Vern's Reviews on the Films of Cinemahttp://outlawvern.com
The Life and Art of VernThu, 09 Aug 2018 00:18:24 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8The Mask of Zorrohttp://outlawvern.com/2018/08/08/the-mask-of-zorro/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/08/the-mask-of-zorro/#commentsWed, 08 Aug 2018 18:27:25 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32299You know me, I love these modern (like, 1990s or later) takes on old timey adventure heroes. For example I enjoyed THE SHADOW, THE PHANTOM, THE LONE RANGER and THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, all of which were considered flops. I suspect the generation that was greenlighting these kinds of pictures is gone, and the tradition […]

]]>You know me, I love these modern (like, 1990s or later) takes on old timey adventure heroes. For example I enjoyed THE SHADOW, THE PHANTOM, THE LONE RANGER and THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, all of which were considered flops. I suspect the generation that was greenlighting these kinds of pictures is gone, and the tradition will die out, but I appreciate their contributions to my entertainment.

There’s only one I can think of that was a genuine hit. THE MASK OF ZORRO opened at #1, made $250 million worldwide, even got a sequel. One of its biggest marks was making Catherine Zeta-Jones into a movie star. Obviously you and I already knew her as a villain who switches to the good guy side in THE PHANTOM, but executive producer Steven Spielberg (DEEP IMPACT) recommended her after seeing her in a Titanic mini-series. MASK OF ZORRO was the thing most people knew her from before ENTRAPMENT, THE HAUNTING, HIGH FIDELITY, TRAFFIC, CHICAGO, etc. For screenwriters Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio (SMALL SOLDIERS), who are credited alongside John Eskow (PINK CADILLAC, AIR AMERICA) and Randall Jahnson (DUDES, THE DOORS) it was the prototype epic-period-adventure-movie template they would use for four PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movies and THE LONE RANGER.

As far as I know nobody ever talks about THE MASK OF ZORRO anymore. But they should. It’s fucking great.

Anthony Hopkins (BAD COMPANY) plays Don Diego de la Vega, a rich California fancy lad who moonlights as the masked vigilante swashbuckler known as Zorro. During the Mexican War of Independence he dashes around, gracefully darting across roofs, swinging with his whip, doing gymkata on flag poles, leaping over people, outsmarting, outfoxing and outfencing corrupt Spanish authorities, giving hope to peasants until, inevitably, he comes home one night to his wife (Mexican actress Julieta Rosen), baby and mansion and finds that fucking Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson, LETHAL WEAPON 3), has figured out who he is and is ready to bust him before fleeing for Spain. A soldier shoots de la Vega’s wife, the Don steals his daughter, and he gets locked up.

But during that thrilling last ride there were two peasant boys, Alejandro (Jose Maria de Tavira Bianchi) and Joaquin (Diego Sieres) Murrieta, who watched and cheered him on, and even tipped him off to an ambush. Twenty years later they’re played by Antonio Banderas (SECURITY) and Victor Rivers (L.A. TAKEDOWN) and they’re sort of Robin Hood type rebel bandits working with Three-Fingered Jack (L.Q. Jones, HANG ‘EM HIGH) until two of the three get shot by Captain Harrison Love (Matt Letscher, 13 HOURS, PREHYSTERIA! 3). Only Alejandro escapes to become a sloppy, vengeance-seeking drunk.

Meanwhile, Zorro is rotting away in a dank dungeon, looking like a long-haired zombie. That is until that asshole Don Rafael Montero comes looking for him, doesn’t recognize him, and assumes he’s dead. Zorro basically reactivates and escapes, as if he could’ve done this from day 1, but didn’t have a reason until that rat fuck was back on California soil. Fate brings de la Vega together with the younger but undisciplined Alejandro, who he duels with his cane and then decides to train for the benefit of one or more of their vendettas.

This is a well told story that has all the good shit you want in a movie like this. Training montages. A secret lair. The passing down of a super hero mantle. Undercover missions. Missions that go comically off the rails due to inexperience. Missions that go incredible because a couple training montages will suffice for legendary skills and grace. A hero who is a father figure to a younger hero who is in love with the father figure’s actual daughter (Zeta-Jones as Elena), who doesn’t know the older hero is her father because she was raised by the villain. Also a villainous master plan that involves stealing gold but who cares, the real issue is that they’re forcing peasants (including children) to mine the gold, and new Zorro doesn’t abide that shit.

The Zorro Cave is pretty cool. There’s a little VIP lounge type area with a table for de la Vega to enjoy wine and a smoke while Alejandro swings and somersaults over a web of ropes. They spar with swords and Alejandro does pushups between three benches over a bed of candles while de la Vega uses his back as a footrest and reads a book.

When the teacher decides the student is ready, they sneak into a dinner for the nobles, where they both get information and as a bonus Alejandro dances sexily with Elena. Alejandro impersonates a don and de la Vega his servant. I have to wonder if Tarantino was homaging (either consciously or unconsciously) MASK OF ZORRO in DJANGO UNCHAINED when King and Django use a similar (but reverse) charade to infiltrate Candyland. Of course it’s a common trope, but check out Alejandro’s outfit!

That piece of shit Don Rafael Montero is not the most colorful villain, but I think he’s a pretty good one due to Wilson’s performance. The character has got to realize he’s evil (in the opening scene he tries to execute three random peasants to lure Zorro) but Wilson plays him like a guy who would try to convince you he was actually pretty cool. Like, he’d swear he really did love de la Vega’s wife (who he got killed), and really does love Elena (who he kidnapped and lied to). He’d probly even claim to kind of like Zorro, judging from his smile as he watches him in action in the opening. Believe me, if we sat down and had a beer together we’d be best friends. I hate to do it, but I just have to kill you and lock up peasants in cages and stuff.

There’s also this little humanizing, comical touch that makes me laugh in two scenes where he reacts to Elena’s obvious sexual attraction to Alejandro. During the party scene he’s walking and talking with some VIPs and straight up does a double take to the couple’s lusty dance. Then he runs down to get a better look, pushes a guy out of the way. Doesn’t look angry. Looks scared.

(Alejandro covers for the dirty dancing with a bullshit slut-shaming move though, saying “Your daughter is a very spirited dancer!” Patrick Swayze he is not. Montero thanks him “for putting it so delicately.” The old man also makes condescending comments about women when Elena shows that she’s the only one at the table with a conscience.)

The other villain, the Captain, has that type of uptight non-charisma that would bug me even if he was nice, so I’m glad I have a legitimate reason to hate him. He just seems like such an unlikable prick, basically a bad cop who murdered Alejandro’s brother, but out of left field he turns out to be a total sicko who he keeps Joaquin’s severed head in a jar and uses it to scare Alejandro. Our boy plays it so cool that he drinks a cup of water out of the jar. And luckily is not vomiting for the rest of the movie.

Despite that fucked up shit this is a really fun, light-hearted movie full of A+ action sequences. Of course there’s lots of sword business (with all the possible matchups between the various heroes and villains) but also you get your 1800s equivalent of high speed vehicle action. He steals a pack of horses from soldiers by jumping on the one at the back and transferring from horse to horse, knocking their riders off one by one and doing show-offy tricks like standing on two horses like he’s waterskiing.

I guess it’s not even technically showing off, because nobody sees him do it. He just exists in a constant state of awesomeness.

And of course there’s a big finale with multiple duels going on at the mine and everybody helping out and the oppressed being liberated and one of the villains getting squooshed under a falling wagon of gold bars. It’s all tied up in a beautiful storybook bow and then it says “you know what, you’re a great audience, you deserve to go out on some more awesomeness. Here is silhouetted Zorro slicing a Z into the screen and for some reason it’s a Z made out of fire. You’re welcome.”

It’s beautiful. We need more bombastic shit like that in our cinema. I don’t even care that it was probly put in there as an apology for the saccharine pop ballad version of the theme music (“I Want To Spend My Lifetime Loving You” – Tina Arena duet with Marc Anthony, to the tune of the score by James Horner) that was about to send us fleeing from the theater.

Also, try not to think about the silhouette pretty much looking like the end of BATMAN AND ROBIN.

Spielberg developed the script in the early ’90s and considered directing it himself before giving it to Mikael Salomon (HARD RAIN, cinematographer of THE ABYSS), with Sean Connery cast as the older Zorro. But in 1995 Robert Rodriguez signed on, bringing his DESPERADO stars Banderas and Salma Hayek. Because of Rodriguez’s track record, Tri-Star saw an opportunity to do it at a lower budget, but he wanted a little more than they’d give him and dropped out. (As always is the case, they ended up making it for $18 million more than he was asking.) Eventually it ended up with director Martin Campbell, his followup to GOLDENEYE. Obviously Banderas stuck around, while Hayek was replaced with the Welsh Salma Hayek.

Cinematographer Phil Meheux (MAX HEADROOM, HIGHLANDER II, GHOST IN THE MACHINE, THE SMURFS) has done half a dozen movies with Campbell, and they work great together here. Here’s a nice shot where they weren’t fucking around about making iconic imagery:

We know from GOLDENEYE and CASINO ROYALE that Campbell can put together a good action scene. I remember Drew McWeeny reporting back in the day that the director used storyboards already prepared by Rodriguez. I can’t confirm that, but I buy it, especially because of all the gags in maybe my favorite sequence, the one where just-starting-out young Zorro goes to steal a horse and has to fight a bunch of guys. They pig pile on him, he crawls out from under the pile without them noticing, gets chased by some other guys, runs up and over the pile, but the pile moves as his pursuers get on top and they go flying. He swings from a rope to a chandelier to some bull horns on the wall which fall down with him and he uses them as a weapon. He finds himself face-to-stomach with a giant

(Óscar Zerafín González) who throws him across the room, where he finds two cannonballs that he uses to knock the guy out. The others watch the behemoth spit out his teeth and fall like a tree and then they look back and Zorro is in kind of a Bugs Bunny pose with a lit torch next to the fuse of the cannon.

Once he blows them away he gets carried away yelling “ZORRO! THE LEGEND HAS RETURNED!” and tosses the torch aside, immediately realizing that he has started a fire near a bunch of explosives. Banderas does a perfect smile and head nod of over-confidence when he has carried a barrel of gun powder away from the flames, but then realizes there’s a hole in it and he’s leaving a trail that is already burning down like a fuse. There’s as much detail in its cool moves and gags as in a great Jackie Chan sequence.

(And a thing that’s either a coincidence or a leftover from Rodriguez’s development: Zorro hides in a confession booth, which also happens in DESPERADO and MACHETE.)

Whatever Rodriguez’s influence, second unit director/stunt coordinator Glenn Randall Jr. (E.T., REMO WILLIAMS, ON DEADLY GROUND, THE SUBSTITUTE) does a fantastic job. And the sword choreography is by Bob Anderson, the Olympic fencer, Darth Vader light saber double and swordplay designer of HIGHLANDER, THE PRINCESS BRIDE and the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, who had also trained the most famous movie swashbuckler ever, Errol Flynn. Banderas, Hopkins and Zeta-Jones rehearsed the fights with him for two months during pre-production. Banderas also spent another four months with the Spanish Olympic fencing team. And it paid off. There are pretty obvious stunt doubles (which I find sort of charming) but also a bunch of scenes that had me thinking “Wow, he really learned to do that?”

I hope, with my love of Old Timey Adventure heroes, that I’m not being too forgiving of outmoded racial attitudes, like one of those people who try to argue that there’s nothing offensive about SONG OF THE SOUTH. I’m very aware that the Lone Ranger and his grandnephew The Green Hornet have amazing partners of other races who are unjustly placed in a subservient sidekick type role. The Phantom is my man and he does right by the natives of Bengala, but he’s definitely a White Savior. And it’s a similar story for Tarzan. I don’t think Zorro has those kinds of connotations, but I really can’t find a definitive answer as to whether he was meant to be of Mexican or Spanish descent. Created in 1919 by pulp writer Johnston McCulley for the serialized story The Curse of Capistrano, he was played by Douglas Fairbanks (who is not Mexican or Spanish) less than a year later in THE MARK OF ZORRO, inspiring the author to send him on more adventures. Whatever Zorro’s background, I support his quest “to avenge the helpless, to punish cruel politicians, to aid the oppressed.” People shame Zorro-inspired Bruce Wayne for being a rich dude super hero, but I think we should be asking this of more of our rich dudes. It’s good to give back.

It didn’t occur to me at first that MASK OF ZORRO might get alot of shit for the nationalities of its cast if it came out now. Hopkins and Zeta-Jones are both Welsh, with the former playing maybe-Spanish and the latter playing at-least-half-Mexican. Banderas was hyped as the first Spanish actor to play Zorro in a Hollywood production, but his character is the fictional brother of an actual historical figure who was Mexican. I didn’t remember much complaint about that at the time (or any about Banderas playing Mexican in DESPERADO) but I discovered Peter Travers did mention it right at the beginning of his negative-for-other- reasons review. A Google search for “‘mask of zorro’ whitewashing” brings up contemporary criticisms of Zeta-Jones. She might’ve gotten away with it if she hadn’t played a Colombian drug kingpin in the 2017 Lifetime movie COCAINE GODMOTHER: THE GRISELDA BLANCO STORY.

Much like THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, the other part that I think might offend 2018 sensibilities was one I was slightly iffy about at the time – the flirtatious and arguably rapey fencing match in which Zorro 2.0 slashes off Elena’s top. In the end it’s clear that she’s the one to kiss him and that her “I might scream” double-entendre was intentional, but up until then it’s definitely playing off of that shitty old idea that a hot guy forcing himself on an unwilling woman is sexy.

I would argue that the MASK OF ZORRO poster, with a black silhouette on red, evolved out of the iconographic BATMAN and DICK TRACY posters, as discussed in previous summer retrospectives. But they were smart enough to know that the same kind of merchandising onslaught wouldn’t work in ’98, or with Zorro. Playmates Toys did have a line of Zorro action figures, but not specific to the movie. It included such Zorros as Classic Zorro, Chain Mail Zorro, Barbed Wire Zorro and Cold Steel Zorro (“With Fire-Forged Daggers”) to oppose such villains as Evil Machete and Evil Ramon (who reminds me of STREET FIGHTER‘s M. Bison). I do think that the shirtless Don Diego Zorro figure looks like it could be a buffed up cartoon caricature of Banderas.

There was a four issue comic book adaptation of the movie, published by Image Comics (home of SPAWN), as well as a novelization by James Luceno, whose other licensed property novels include a Young Indiana Jones Chronicle, 21 Robotechs, around 15 Star Warses, and (fittingly) the 1994 movie of THE SHADOW.

Even twenty years ago it was kind of a tall order to ask the world to treat a Zorro adventure as a big event movie. But Campbell and friends mounted an irresistible argument. In a summer where certain others were insulting audiences with cynical, stupid repackagings of old shit reborn as instantly-dated modern crap, Campbell and friends just went for a more timeless approach of straight ahead action, romance, humor and heroic archetypes. If you like that shit, this is worth rewatching. (If you don’t, that’s kind of weird, isn’t it?)

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/08/the-mask-of-zorro/feed/28I did another podcast: Zebras in Americahttp://outlawvern.com/2018/08/08/i-did-another-podcast-zebras-in-america/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/08/i-did-another-podcast-zebras-in-america/#commentsWed, 08 Aug 2018 08:26:13 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32352Hey everybody, it’s another chance to destroy my carefully cultivated aura of mysteriousness! The podcast Zebras in America invited me to be on their new episode, so I did, and it was fun. I’m afraid to listen to it, but I remember questions we addressed included what is Jean Claude Van Damme’s best movie, was […]

]]>Hey everybody, it’s another chance to destroy my carefully cultivated aura of mysteriousness! The podcast Zebras in America invited me to be on their new episode, so I did, and it was fun. I’m afraid to listen to it, but I remember questions we addressed included what is Jean Claude Van Damme’s best movie, was Dave Bautista a good wrestler, is Bruce Willis phoning it in, should The Rock make better movies, who are my favorite rappers, and how do I know about Ram El Zee. I like these guys alot because they knew most of the DTV action movies I dropped but also are way more knowledgeable than me about art movies. From what I can gather, two of Marcus’s biggest interests are pro-wrestling and the films of Claire Denis, and obviously I respect that kind of range.

Note: when listing favorite West Coast rappers I forgot Digital Underground, Xzibit, and I think even Snoop.

ZEBRAS IN AMERICA EPISODE 66 is on iTunes and stuff or you can check it out HERE.

P.S. I just now figured out that the title is a reference to FREDDY GOT FINGERED.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/08/i-did-another-podcast-zebras-in-america/feed/6Revengehttp://outlawvern.com/2018/08/07/revenge-2/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/07/revenge-2/#commentsTue, 07 Aug 2018 17:46:31 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32340REVENGE (the 2018 release with the pink logo, not the Kevin Costner/Tony Scott one) is a great rape-revenge movie. Not a subversive one in my opinion, just a really good version of the form that goes mercifully light on the first r-word and entertainingly extravagant on the second. Obviously the very idea of the genre […]

]]>REVENGE (the 2018 release with the pink logo, not the Kevin Costner/Tony Scott one) is a great rape-revenge movie. Not a subversive one in my opinion, just a really good version of the form that goes mercifully light on the first r-word and entertainingly extravagant on the second. Obviously the very idea of the genre is upsetting, but as far as these things go, it’s a fun time. It has no interest in gritty realism or wiping your nose in the shit. It’s not even about any “dig two graves” or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT don’t-stoop-to-their-level anti-revenge moralism. It has alot of symbolism and poetic exaggeration and exists in a world where human bodies have an impressive capacity for withstanding severe injuries and extreme blood loss.

(NOTE: If this sounds like something you can dig, I suggest seeing it and not reading the rest of this review yet, because I will be using SPOILERS to discuss alot of what I find most interesting in it.)

It’s the story of Jen (Matilda Lutz, RINGS), a young… I guess “sexpot” is one word people would’ve used for her not long ago, who is the younger mistress of a rich dude named Richard (Kevin Janssens, THE ARDENNES). He takes her out in a helicopter to his cool little isolated vacation villa in the middle of a desert, and they have sex and hang out by the pool and relax. It’s out in the middle of nowhere and there’s a refrigerator full of champagne and some peyote for later. The furnishings are sparse and hip and I don’t know what it means that two of the panes of glass are violet and green like old school 3D glasses, but I like it.

Then, unexpectedly, two dudes show up at the glass door while she’s listening to her iPod with no pants on. Richard’s buddies Stanley (Vincent Colombe, POINT BLANK [2010]) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchede) are a couple days early for the boys’ hunting trip. They clearly didn’t know he was having an affair, but they’re charmed by Jen and hang out and flirt and what the hell, she’s with Richard so what harm is there in strutting it and enjoying the attention of older men while she’s on this getaway on her way to a new life in L.A. where she hopes “to be noticed.”

It’s seductively stylish, with a cool electronic score by Rob – not just some dude named Rob, but the one that did the remake of MANIAC – and cinematography by somebody named Robrecht Heyvaert. It has a male gaze, and it also gazes right back at that gaze. We see Richard and the pilot sharing a look at Jen’s ass when she walks away from the helicopter. We see Stan and Dimitri watch her ass journey down the hall away from them. First time feature director/writer/co-editor Coralie Fargeat (please picture the director pulling up on a motorcycle, removing her helmet and whipping out her long hair to reveal that that’s right, a lady can direct a rape-revenge movie) will turn the tables later, showing more (and more degrading) male nudity than female, but for now her approach isn’t drastically different from what you’d expect from a very good male director.

The nightmare starts while Richard is out of the villa, and Stan decides that her dancing with him the night before was a sex invite. She tries to brush him off politely but he turns out to be that very familiar type of misogynist bastard who is friendly until he learns that sex is out of the question and all the sudden he’s a cruel weirdo who believes he’s been wronged and must aggressively confront her about it. And worse.

More surprising than his assault are the reactions of the other two men. Dimitri walks in on it and has an opportunity to intervene – then he he steps out and turns up the TV to drown out her screams. You’re not sure at first if he’s just too much of a coward to stand up to his friend or what. And then Richard, rather than protecting her or even making Stan leave tells her “I fixed everything,” just meaning he’s gonna pay her off to not say anything and go live in Canada. And when she correctly refuses this offer to control her destiny he pushes her off a cliff.

Man does it seem like she should be dead. She doesn’t hit the ground because she gets fully impaled on a tree. She looks crucified. Fargeat is much more interested in cool than real. And it would be cool for her to be able to lift herself up off of that thing, but it’s more cool that she uses her earbuds to lasso her lighter and set some brush on fire and burn the tree to make it split. I’ve definitely never seen that move in a movie before.

It’s pretty light on dialogue, but the imagery says so much. Destroying the evidence of their crime, the men burn her “I L.A.” t-shirt, the embodiment of her dreams. They get suited up in their tactical asshole gear – camo, leather, scarves, Dimitri wearing a shirt that says “U.S. Navy” even though he’s French – and get on a motorcycle, a 4-wheeler, a Jeep. When they go to collect Jen’s body they just see the scorched earth where the tree was, and it struck me that she has been reborn from the ashes like a phoenix. Fargeat makes the comparison more explicit in the medically implausible but cinematically outstanding scene where she tends to her stomach wound by branding it with a beer can which (I was so hoping this would happen) burns its phoneix-like bird logo onto her flesh.

But it’s a while before she does that, which also made me happy, because it has long bothered me that in movies people always remove the things they’ve been impaled with, when it is my understanding that you should leave them in to prevent blood loss. So hats off to Jen the Phoenix for trekking the desert and doing battle with a piece of wood sticking out of her. I think in this case it’s also symbolic, because she has been forcefully penetrated by this phallic object, which she then broke off and it became her own phallus as she went after the motherfuckers who put her here. And by the climax she’ll be chasing down a guy with a wound in the same area that could fairly be described as vaginal. Is it too much to wish that she still had the stick at that point and she penetrated his wound with it? Yes, I think that is too much. Apologies, everyone.

Jen uses the peyote to help with the pain, but the psychedelia doesn’t ramp up as much as you might expect. The perspective of the camera has already put us into a heightened state of awareness. Early on it focuses on an apple with no literal significance, but later we draw the parallel that Jen stuck on that tree is like an apple with a bite taken out of it, left on the counter for its exposed flesh to turn brown, to be discovered by ants. In the desert an ant dodges Jen’s blood drops, falling nearby with the force of bombs. Through editing we see a similarity between Stan and a tongue-flicking lizard.

These disgusting men will try to kill Jen to hide their crimes, and she will strike back. She never abandons her dangly pink star-outline earrings – to me a signifier of her Hollywood aspirations – but otherwise she transforms like Johns McClane and Rambo, her hair, skin and clothes darkened by dirt and blood, her hips carrying salvaged weapons, her skimpy pool party outfit recontextualizing as non-confining warrior gear. She intuits how to fire giant guns (even if the recoil is a bitch) and I love the image of her finger on the trigger, highlighted with a few remaining flecks of neon pink fingernail polish, remnants of a different life less than 24 hours ago..

Of course this must all lead to a conclusive showdown between Jen and final boss Richard back at the villa. While she has morphed from shiny party girl to furious force of nature, world’s worst sugar daddy has de-evolved. I swear at the beginning he looks like a handsome dreamboat, clearly the hot guy among the trio, but after his turn he starts seeming more like a Christophe Waltz type, and in the climax he’s literally naked and pathetic, wounded, crawling on the floor with his ass in the air, his little dick hanging out. The filmatism turns him into the victim in a slasher movie – he gets the ever present post-PSYCHO trope of taking a shower and then hearing a noise and having to check around the house feeling scared and vulnerable. Of course, he keeps a shotgun leaning up against the bathroom wall.

One of many great touches: to survive a serious stomach wound he wraps himself tightly with Reynold’s wrap.

I really wanted to see REVENGE after great buzz from film festivals and a limited arthouse/VOD type release but I’ve finally got to it now that it’s on disc. Whether or not it counts as a horror movie is up to your definition, but it’s distributed by Shudder and clearly in a tradition that includes famous drive-in hits like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. When something like that gets hyped up in the non-horror – let’s call it secular – crowd I can be unnecessarily sensitive about whether critics or (worse) the filmatists try to distance it from the genre. Especially in a case like this where the movie has been interpreted as feminist with a possible inference that all other movies of its type are the opposite.

Luckily I had been saving Fargeat’s episodes of Post Mortem and The Q&A to listen to, and both are enlightening. She says she didn’t watch any rape-revenge movies other than LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which she says nothing further about. Instead she mentions as influences KILL BILL, Mad Max, Rambo, and DUEL. She says she wanted to do a story about a character who seems weak but transforms herself, and exists in a “metaphorical world bigger than the story itself.” Mission accomplished! She repeatedly references the tone of South Korean cinema and Tarantino, which makes alot of sense to me.

When she says MAD MAX and RAMBO I don’t think she means the specific movies with those titles, but she repeatedly references the look of the desert in FURY ROAD and the character of Rambo. FIRST BLOOD seems to me like the RAMBO this has the most in common with.

I also thought wow, this is a really promising new director, now everybody’s gonna mention her every time there’s a super hero or a Star War that needs helming, and she probly has no interest in that shit. It’s true, her plans are to continue with envelope-pushing fringe movies, which I’d rather see her do than a Hollywood gig. But she does talk about loving movies after growing up playing with STAR WARS toys, and even mentions loving WILLOW! So maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Lucasfilm hit her up some day.

REVENGE is now officially in contention for my favorite movie of the year. I feel a little weird saying that because I know there are plenty of people I would never recommend it to. It reminds me a little bit of movies like WOLF CREEK and I SAW THE DEVIL that have such intoxicatingly good filmmaking that I can kind of think of them as a fun time and forget that they’re incredibly dark and morbid and that plenty of reasonable people would think I was a sick for saying that.

But this one is more inspirational and has more of a… can I call it a happy ending? I don’t know. I’m sorry. But I loved it.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/07/revenge-2/feed/10Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdomhttp://outlawvern.com/2018/08/06/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/06/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom/#commentsMon, 06 Aug 2018 18:05:11 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32331This is weird, there’s a JURASSIC PARK sequel that came out 2 1/2 months ago and I didn’t get around to seeing it until this weekend, when it’s down to two showings a day. I think I saw all the other ones opening day or weekend. But maybe it was a smart move on this […]

]]>This is weird, there’s a JURASSIC PARK sequel that came out 2 1/2 months ago and I didn’t get around to seeing it until this weekend, when it’s down to two showings a day. I think I saw all the other ones opening day or weekend. But maybe it was a smart move on this one because it benefits from the lowered expectations of everyone telling me it was trash.

In JURASSIC WORLD, you remember, they reopened the dinosaur park and the dinosaurs reattacked the new park and there was a new guy named Owen Grady (Chris Pratt, WEINERS) who was real macho and always trying to show off the size of his forearms. And he trains raptors and has a contentious bickery love with an uptight lady who works at the park named Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard, TERMINATOR SALVATION).

In FALLEN KINGDOM, the dinos are still loose on abandoned Isla Nubar, where a volcano is about to erupt. Claire is now a dinosaur rights activist trying to convince the government to act to save these endangered dinosaurs. She’s contacted by Eli Mills (Rafe Spall, GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS), who runs the estate of John Hammond’s dying partner Lockwood (James Cromwell, SPECIES II; also played Howard’s father in SPIDER-MAN 3) and wants to fund the rescue mission. But he especially wants to find Blue, the most intelligent raptor, and knows that Owen is the only person who could track her.

Also along for the ride are two new dinosaur activist characters, Dr. Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda, NEWLYWEDS) and Franklin Webb (Justice Smith, PAPER TOWNS). Zia calls herself a “paleo-veterinarian” and knows how to do a blood transfusion from a t-rex to a raptor even though this is her first time seeing dinosaurs. But it’s kinda cool to have a scientist character who’s a tough lady with hipster glasses and tattoos. Franklin is the computer expert but Smith, who is so cool as Books, the main character on the great Netflix show The Get Down, is not well-served by the comic relief of being nerdy and scared all the time. Though he does a pretty funny high pitched scream.

I still wish they called this THE LOST PARK: JURASSIC WORLD. And it does kind of rehash some of the ideas of THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, with lead characters from the last one reluctantly returning to the park for a dinosaur rescue mission, and then when they get there there are a bunch of macho asshole hunter dicks driving around who don’t respect the animals at all and brutalize them and really want to take them for nefarious, capitalistic, extremely stupid purposes, and then they get loose on the mainland.

Also the title they went with is really misleading because I thought it was a new section of the park that’s themed after that Denzel Washington movie FALLEN. That’s what it sounds like, right? But it’s not.

Mills’s villainous scheme is to auction off the dinosaurs to international villains. That includes a new creation, the “Indoraptor,” which uses DNA from JURASSIC WORLD’s man-made species the Indomitus Rex and combines it with Blue’s raptor DNA, recommended for military applications. I guess that will be the thing now, they introduce a new fake dinosaur in each sequel. In my opinion they’ve been overhyping this prototype, though, because nobody should pay millions of dollars for the ultimate genetically engineered predator only to find that a couple people can repeatedly hide behind a statue without it hearing, smelling or sensing them, and then for it to chase after them and keep stumbling and just missing them. Like, it happens fifteen or more times within a 15 minute period. It gets outrun by a little girl. They’re supposed to use this thing in wars? This super-monster is a total lemon.

I seem to have liked JURASSIC WORLD more than most, but I don’t remember it that well. I do recall complaints about Claire running around the island in heels. Trevorrow was accused of sexism but ironically it was Howard who insisted that was how her character felt most comfortable. The joke they make about it here is subtle: the first time we see her, the shot starts on her pumps. But on the island she wears boots. Sell out.

Last time I appreciated that Pratt was playing a type of masculinity that’s kind of out of fashion. Macho and covered in grease and always working on engines and shit. This time he’s introduced building himself a house and he has kind of an Indy/Marion contentious reunion with Claire, but for the most part is kind of generic action hero. I guess it’s cool that they give him the series’ first long-take-where-he-runs-across-a-room-punching-a-series-of-dudes. Reminded me of TEMPLE OF DOOM or something.

Ted Levine in THE MANGLER

Like JURASSIC WORLD, this was written by Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow, though Trevorrow did not direct because he was busy doing THE BOOK OF HENRY and the STAR WARS EPISODE XI that he would be fired from. Instead it’s directed by J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE, THE IMPOSSIBLE, A MONSTER CALLS). There are some well directed sequences, mostly in the first section of total dino mayhem as the mercenaries, led by not-even-trying-to-hide-that-he’s-evil Wheatley (Ted Levine, THE MANGLER, THE HILLS HAVE EYES) turn on the activists and the thunder lizards stampede away from natural disaster. Maybe the cleverest is when Owen has been shot by a tranquilizer dart and can barely move as a triceratops drags a big, super-detailed-cg tongue over his face. Then he WOLF OF WALL STREETs his almost-paralyzed body away from slow moving molten lava.

The most intense one is where Claire and Franklin drive the plexiglass bubble vehicle off a cliff into water and Owen heroically swims down and has to try a bunch of shit to get them out while dinosaurs and globs of hot lava drip from above.

But there’s an inordinate amount of the movie taking place at the Lockwood mansion, which does have an underground dinosaur cloning lab, but still feels a little dull and small time for a fuckin JURASSIC PARK movie. And I honestly have no idea if Lockwood is a character who was ever mentioned before. I assumed that he must’ve been in JURASSIC WORLD and I forgot about him, but apparently not.

As you’ve seen in the trailers, Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm returns for a brief guest appearance at a hearing basically gloating that he was right and the dinosaurs are super fucking dangerous and this is crazy man. And then another hearing that they have afterwards for him to reiterate the gloating. It’s kinda cool that he comes back but honestly not that cool because the last time we saw him in part 2 he was a fuckin rockstar who wears a leather jacket and sunglasses and people ask for his autograph on the subway because of his book about chaos theory. And/or his dinosaur encounter. Now he’s just an old guy.

There is one and only one way they could’ve knocked this scene out of the park, and that’s if during the testimony he turned to the spectators to make eye contact with his daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester, now 34) and she’s wearing an Olympic gold medal for gymnastics. None of the previous JURASSIC kids return, but there’s a subplot about Lockwood’s granddaughter Maisie (first timer Isabella Sermon). She’s arguably not as silly as the other kid characters in the series, but she’s the only one who’s kept separate from the heroes for most of the movie, so she seems gratuitous until they find her hiding in a vent like Newt.

I definitely gotta rank this as the stupidest of the JURASSIC PARK series, and my second least favorite after part three-claw-slashes. That said, there’s enough good pulpy stuff that I had a big dumb grin on my face on several occasions. The transparently evil villains make the eaten-off-the-toilet lawyer from part 1 seem subtle and true to life, but at least it makes it more fun when the dinosaurs get loose. I enjoyed motherfuckers getting pieces munched off and thrown around and particularly a scene (COOL PART SPOILER) where the guy with the thick skull runs around a room full of rich assholes ramming them and you can’t always see where he is but you see people flying out of the crowd like they’re being fired out of a cannon.

I didn’t so much enjoy the Ryan-Reynolds-meets-Dane-Cook smarminess of Mills, or Toby Jones (THE MIST), but Levine is always a good bad guy, and they go the extra mile by having him call Zia a “nasty woman,” so when he reaches his inevitable Death By Poor Decision (he SPOILER goes into the Indoraptor cage for a trophy tooth) we can imagine him wearing a MAGA hat. I noticed another dig at Trump during a news report about “the Isla Nubar Crisis.” The scroll says “U.S. President questions existence of dinosaurs in the first place.” We’re in a sad moment where it pulls you out of a movie if they refer to a president who sounds competent (see MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT). Here they go extra-extra-extra-extra sub-moronic to make it seem almost as dumb as something you saw the real one tweet while you were waiting for the movie to start.

Definitely my favorite thing about this movie is that there is now a continuing dinosaur character, and she’s shown the respect of two major action moments. I was very happy to see Blue get to jump away from an explosion, though it could’ve been better with slow motion. Thankfully she gets that treatment and then some in the SPOILER glorious Indoraptor coup de grace when they fall through glass together and spin around and the heavy is triple-impaled on a triceratops skull.

It’s fair to say that this is not at all worthy of the series started by Steven Spielberg. It’s also fair to say that it’s fun to watch extremely detailed digital dinosaurs chew people up and get involved in increasingly ridiculous situations. If you, like me, enjoy JAWS sequels, you may have the capacity to appreciate this one.

Miscellaneous SPOILER notes:

They keep drawing out a big reveal of who Maisie’s dead mother was, which had me scratching my head because who could it possibly be that would be relevant – the little girl from part 1? The little girl who gets attacked in the opening of part 2? Well, it turns out Maisie is actually a clone of Lockwood’s daughter who died too young. Which I suppose makes sense for this world, but the awkward way it comes out makes it seem laughable. Anyway, the way she climbs around the building maybe she was engineered for parkour.

The Indoraptor is trained so that you can signal it with a high pitched frequency to attack whatever you’re pointing a laser sight at. And then they’re trapped on a glass roof and Claire defeats it by intentionally targeting Owen and then he kind of matadors it to fall through the glass. Which was cool but why didn’t she think of just aiming the target in the distance? Wouldn’t that be a safer bet?

The delightfully ludicrous climax involves the moral decision of whether to let the dinosaurs die from a gas leak or just release them into human civilization. I thought it was really funny that this could be done by pressing a big red button that says something about “PRESS IN EMERGENCY.” Basically they have an emergency dinosaur release button!

So, I kinda loved the ending. Hey, you’re a clone, and you let the dinosaurs out, so you’re our daughter now. Let’s go for a drive. And I especially like that Owen tries to convince his BDF Blue to get in a cage and she considers it but decides nah. I imagine she’ll travel from town to town helping people like The Incredible Hulk.

And now they’ve set up a sequel that might owe a story credit to the Dinosaurs Attack! trading cards. They better go all the way on that one.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/06/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom/feed/19There’s Something About Maryhttp://outlawvern.com/2018/08/01/theres-something-about-mary/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/01/theres-something-about-mary/#commentsWed, 01 Aug 2018 19:14:31 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32263I forgot to mention in the SMALL SOLDIERS and PI reviews that LETHAL WEAPON 4 also came out that week. Then… July 15, 1998 We all know the studios can be pretty cynical and obvious in the summer time. When you’re dumping millions upon millions of dollars into these cinematic behemoths that are gonna battle […]

July 15, 1998

We all know the studios can be pretty cynical and obvious in the summer time. When you’re dumping millions upon millions of dollars into these cinematic behemoths that are gonna battle it out for supremacy of Blockbuster Island, you’re usually gonna lean toward easier bets – an old TV show or character people recognize, an easy to explain spectacle. Industrial light and mayhem. Disaster movies seemed like the thing after INDEPENDENCE DAY and TITANIC, so in Summer of ’98 we got the comet and the asteroid and the name brand giant monster, and it’s not that surprising that ARMAGEDDON would be the #1 grossing movie worldwide, or that GODZILLA would be #3. (That a war drama would be in between them was a little less predictable, but then again it was Steven Spielberg directing Tom Hanks.)

When an original comedy comes in at #4, though, that means something. That’s one that has to be earned. THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, the Farrelly Brothers’ followup to KINGPIN, was an R-rated comedy with dick and semen jokes that somehow seemed a little elevated by their audaciousness, and it fucked up the zeitgeist way harder than Godzilla did New York. Laughs do matter.

Ben Stiller (HIGHWAY TO HELL) plays the hapless male lead Ted Stroehmann, and I mean he is completely devoid of hap. Sure, in the 1985 prologue (adult Stiller playing a 16 year old with a wig and braces is a treat) he does hap into a prom date with radiant babe Mary Jensen (Cameron Diaz [THE COUNSELOR], previously seen in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS), but before they even leave her house a series of mishaps mishappen, and he misses the actual prom on account of public penis injury.

On paper that must sound dumb, but you’ve probly seen it, so you know the irresistibility of this escalating gauntlet of absurdly extravagant embarrassments. Stiller was well established as an edgy comedic voice with The Ben Stiller Show, his MTV Movie Awards sketches and THE CABLE GUY, but I think this movie turned him into mainstream comedy movie star by revealing his talent for being a human indignity sponge, a likable doofus with the Christ-like purpose of absorbing all of man’s degradations, usually with a look on his face that says “oh, come on, man,” or meek words of protest that severely undersell the vast levels of bad luck and injustice he’s suffering in our place.

This particular sequence of events begins with dorky Ted peeing in the Jensen family bathroom, glancing out the window to smile at a singing bird, only to be mistaken for peeping into Mary’s window as her mother (Markie Post from Night Court – one of only a handful of movies she’s in) helps her fix her dress. That misunderstanding seems insignificant after he quickly zips his pants back up and gets… stuff caught in the zipper. Maybe it takes a juvenile mind to build a whole movie around an extended dick mangling sequence, I’m not sure. But only a Farrelly mind knows to stack it with the humiliation of a series of adults coming in and trying to help. There’s Mary’s dad (Keith David, SAVAGE DOG), whose reaction runs the gamut: skepticism, terror, sympathy, anger. He brings in Mary’s mom (“Don’t worry, she’s a dental hygienist, she’ll know exactly what to do”), who can’t think of anything better than spraying it with Bactine. Then a cop appears in the window saying, “Neighbors say they heard a lady scream.” And then a fireman just barges in the door. When he sees what’s going on he laughs and tells “Mike and Eddie” over the walkie-talkie to “bring everybody, bring a camera, you’re not gonna believe this!”

The part I remembered most, of course, was the brief shock shot of the so-called “franks and beans.” But this scene has like a million little jokes in it that I love: Ted squeaking out “Oh, I wish” when Mr. Jensen asks if he shit himself or something, Mr. Jensen sitting down and putting on his glasses to examine the crotch before he freaks out, Mrs. Jensen’s hand gestures as she tries to ascertain “What exactly are we, uh, looking at here?”, Mr. Jensen telling the cop “You gotta take a look at this thing” and then asking “Ain’t it a beaut?”, the cop angrily asking “What. The hell. Were you thinking?,” later very seriously rolling his sleeves up after announcing “Look, there’s only one thing to do here,” Ted pathetically trying to convince them to let him just cover it with his untucked shirt and go to the dance…

Young Mary is a note perfect crush for Ted: pretty, radiant smile, impossibly nice, but not necessarily the head cheerleader or anything with her dorky laugh and fights with mean kids protecting her mentally challenged brother Warren (W. Earl Brown [EXCESSIVE FORCE], previously in DEEP IMPACT). Diaz really sells Mary’s overwhelming, non-judgmental positivity and shakes her lanky limbs around in that way that young people do when they have more energy than they know what to do with and aren’t self conscious enough to care about being graceful.

In present day 1998, though, Mary becomes kind of a joke about what would be the unattainable dream girl for a Farrelly Brother: more attractive than ever, but very much a dude at heart. She’s a big sports fan, loves making off color jokes, prefers hot dogs to other foods, finds gross guys adorable, and considers HAROLD AND MAUDE “the greatest love story of our time.”

Mary moved away immediately after the incident, which honestly seems merciful for Ted. But grown up and single he starts remembering it as unfinished business, and his dumbass married friend Dom (Chris Elliott, MANHUNTER) convinces him that it’s okay to hire a detective to find her. Matt Dillon had a hell of a summer between his straight-faced (but two-faced) role in WILD THINGS and the playfully sleazy p.i. Pat Healy. He locates Mary in Florida, stakes her out, falls for her himself, talks Ted out of pursuing her and does it himself. Overhearing a conversation with girlfriends about her ideal man he pretends to be a self-employed architect, love HAROLD AND MAUDE, etc.

I have a hard time reviewing comedies, because I end up just listing things I think are funny. I think Healy is really funny. He’s an idiot – “a mook” Mary says, lovingly – and he goes all out trying to pull off these lies. Like, when he reports back to Ted he could just say she’s married, but instead he pretends to be giving good news but includes lies he thinks will scare Ted away like that she has a bunch of kids, she’s in a wheelchair, she’s overweight.

And I always laugh at the clueless awfulness of trying to paint himself as a saint by talking about his passion for working with people he calls “retards.”

I’ve really only had a few of these in my life – comedies that I saw in the theater and the mob-laughter of that audience is such a strong part of the experience of the movie that it’s hard for me to separate them in my mind. There was a sold out opening night showing of BORAT where I laughed harder than I’ve ever laughed at anything before or since, and it was made all the funnier by the discomfort of the stranger in the seat next to me never laughing once. There was a been-out-for-a-while-but-there-are-some-people-here showing of the first JACKASS movie that I remember for the camaraderie of laughing and cringing and covering our eyes together.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY was something a little different, a sort of symphonic approach, with funny shit spread throughout but with three major set pieces that built to crescendoes of laughter: the ludicrously building “franks and beans” sequence and the two drugged dog slapstick sequences.

And maybe the biggest laugh was the hair gel semen joke, which I found to be the only big one that didn’t really hold up on this viewing, not through any fault of the joke but just because it became so famous and associated with the movie (including having the silly hair do in some of the promo art) that it went from something you can’t believe someone came up with, can’t believe you’re seeing in a movie, to an oversaturated pop culture thing. An Austin Powers catch phrase.

The dog jokes might’ve suffered a similar fate (they kicked off a period when all comedies had to have some sort of animal injury joke) except they’re so full of ridiculous details (Pat exposing wires to jolt the dog’s heart, Ted doing a WWF style elbow drop on the little guy) that they don’t really wear out. And as much as the key art inoculated us to the image of Puffy in a full body cast, I still laugh at Ted hiding that he accidentally left him on top of the car.

We like to think things have changed so much, hopefully in a progressive direction, and in many ways they have. Remember, back then “Don’t ask, don’t tell” seemed like an improvement on “don’t be in the military at all,” and same sex marriage was out of the question! Much to the chagrin of some, we’ve gotten more sensitive about portrayals and representations of different minority groups in movies. Standards are higher. But trying to decide if THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY is “problematic” now, as they say, I come to almost the same standstill I did twenty years ago.

There’s only one arguably homophobic gag, but it’s a big one, where Ted is mistakenly swept up in a sting operation of dudes cruising for sex at a rest stop. He’s honestly just going to the bathroom and he literally falls into a huge orgy. It’s a perfectly set up joke about the ridiculousness of him getting placed in this world he knows nothing about and other related misunderstandings, but I felt then and now that there’s something gross about the only gay characters in the movie being treated as weirdos in the bushes running from police floodlights.

There’s also the matter of the character of Warren and all the jokes about him yelling out “he was masturbating!” or throwing Ted through a table or whatever. Alot of the humor is about Ted getting blamed for everything – when Warren lifts him up and airplane spins him, Warren’s mom yells “Ted, you get down from there!” Is laughing at the social situations he causes the same as laughing at his disability? A quick search shows many excoriations of the movie, from 1998 and later, for promoting stereotypes about disability. And I imagine it would all be worse if they’d gone with an earlier idea of having Chris Farley play the character.

On the other hand we see Mary being so non-condescendingly loving of her brother and other characters played by actual developmentally disabled actors who I believe the Farrellys knew from their own volunteer work. Freddy is played by Warren Tashjian, the older brother of one of their childhood friends, who inspired the character of Warren. Mary’s friendship with these people is a central part of her life, while Healy’s accidental insensitivity toward them is a key reason why he’s a total goon.

There’s also the matter of Mary’s friend Tucker (Lee Evans, THE MEDALLION), who walks on crutches, and in one scene the Farrellys create great discomfort with a scene where he insists on Mary not helping him pick up something he dropped, though it’s very hard for him to pick up. It’s clearly not appropriate to laugh, and they test you by making it comically exaggerated, something that reads differently when (SPOILER) you know that he’s a faker.

Here’s a piece from Ability Magazine that holds the Farrellys and their work in a very high regard, for what that’s worth.

The one aspect that makes me slightly more uncomfortable now than it did twenty years ago is that it makes comedy out of Chris Elliott as crazed, hives-faced, shoe-stealing Woogie ambushing Mary, against his restraining order. Then again, it’s important to the theme of the movie to have a character who is undeniably a stalker by strict definition.

See, I actually think the movie is very of-the-moment in its fascination with turning the tropes of normal romantic comedies on their heads. Much of the premise here is pretty standard for a movie that could’ve starred Hugh Grant/Tom Hanks/Richard Gere/John Cusack and Julia Roberts/Meg Ryan/Sandra Bullock/Drew Barrymore/Minnie Driver/Jennifer Aniston or somebody, including the married friend who gives him the bad idea, the structure of meeting up and falling for each other and then the devastation of the false pretenses coming out and then realizing he was wrong and trying to do the right thing, therefore proving his worth to her.

And of course there’s got to be some competition for her heart, but the twist that changes everything is that Mary is so desirable that every male involved ends up trying to trick her into love – the private detective, the close male friend who she introduces the private detective to, the best friend Dom, even the froggy-voiced old man she brings sandwiches to. There’s not some snooty rich guy she’s dating who if she only knew the truth she would see he’s bad for her, allowing us to root for their relationship to go bad so Ted can get in there. No, she’s somehow, miraculously, unattached, and all these shitheads are pathetic phonies and although Ted is not nearly as brazen (like, he doesn’t fake a job, a nationality or a disability), the obvious parallels between what they’re all doing make it plain how wrong he is to deceive her like this. He and Dom even joked about whether hiring a detective constituted being a stalker, Ted not realizing that Dom literally was a stalker.

A few promotional items.

Though KINGPIN is definitely my favorite Farrelly Brothers film, THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY remains one of the funniest movies of its era. I just Googled “funniest movies of the 90s” and it came up next to DUMB AND DUMBER, CLERKS, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, WAYNE’S WORLD, GROUNDHOG DAY, TOMMY BOY and DAZED AND CONFUSED. It was #17 on a Guardian “best comedy films of all time” list, #13 on a Rolling Stone “25 Funniest Movies” readers poll . At the time, Diaz was nominated for a Golden Globe, and they won a bunch of MTV Movie Awards. And the movie got great reviews. Gene Siskel chose it as the #8 film of 1998, his last top ten list. (He had ANTZ at #6 though!?)

After that, the Farrelly Brothers’ powers dropped off a little. ME, MYSELF & IRENE was a hit, but seems kinda forgotten. SHALLOW HAL really pushed their penchant for button-pushing that’s well intentioned but not taken as such by many. THE THREE STOOGES is funny, I swear, and did okay enough that they’re supposedly doing a sequel now, but the Farrellys don’t seem to be involved. Stiller, however, was catapulted into mainstream movie star status and acted out more severe humiliation in the MEET THE PARENTS series, and did whatever he does in the NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM and MADAGASCAR movies. He was still able to have a strong comedic voice as writer/director/star of ZOOLANDER and TROPIC THUNDER. Diaz brought joy to the two CHARLIE’S ANGELS, made lots of money with the SHREK series, was in some interesting movies like BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, GANGS OF NEW YORK, THE BOX and THE COUNSELOR, and in 2013 was reported to be Hollywood’s highest-paid actress over 40. But she hasn’t been in anything since 2014 and referred to herself as retired in an Entertainment Weekly interview this year. Dillon was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for CRASH (2005) and did the voice of “Trey” in ROCK DOG.

1998 shit: I was thinking it wouldn’t really happen now, because he could probly just find Mary on Facebook and wouldn’t need a private investigator. Then I realized that she might avoid an internet presence because of her experience being stalked by Woogie. If so, Ted hiring someone to track her down would be even more creepy and wrong.

The soundtrack is identifiably ’90s because of songs by The Dandy Warhols, The Lemonheads, etc. But there’s an emphasis on more retro kind of songs, especially in the scenes with the landlord Magda (Lin Shaye, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET), and the memorable end credits for some reason have the whole cast lip-synching “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations. (Diaz in particular is so clearly into it that it’s hard not to be left with a real joyful feeling at the end of the movie.) The scenes with Jonathan Richman as a singing narrator are also fairly timeless, as he’s been performing since the ’70s and solo since the early ’80s.

Like the heroes of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, MR. JEALOUSY and HENRY FOOL, Ted is said to be a writer. But we never see him writing or hear any specifics about what he writes.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/08/01/theres-something-about-mary/feed/32Eighth Gradehttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/31/eighth-grade/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/31/eighth-grade/#commentsTue, 31 Jul 2018 19:36:29 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32290EIGHTH GRADE is a beautifully true high definition close-up on the most awkward of ages. You don’t feel like a kid anymore, but the high schoolers you’re about to be tossed in with seem like adults, and you haven’t even caught up with the kids your own age. If you’re Kayla (Elsie Fisher, a voice […]

]]>EIGHTH GRADE is a beautifully true high definition close-up on the most awkward of ages. You don’t feel like a kid anymore, but the high schoolers you’re about to be tossed in with seem like adults, and you haven’t even caught up with the kids your own age. If you’re Kayla (Elsie Fisher, a voice in the DESPICABLE ME film saga) you pride yourself on knowing how to conquer life – in fact your hobby is creating Youtube videos giving friendly, positive advice – but really you feel like every single other person knows what they’re doing and you don’t.

The movie isn’t in first person, like I’m describing it here, but it’s almost that intimate. So much of it stays close on her face, the kids around her a little out of focus. From her terrified expressions you can feel her chest about to implode with tension, but you can also tell that nobody notices. They’re off in their own world. They don’t even look at her.

For my money this is an improved grade of WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. It captures the nightmare of social awkwardness without having to exaggerate the ugliness of the world. It’s not mean. It’s real. Sure, there’s cringing, but it’s organic cringing, not pushed-to-the-limit cringing like we enjoy in Curb Your Enthusiasm and stuff. The events are mostly mundane – a birthday party where she doesn’t fit in, a trip to the mall with older kids – but they feel as heavy and monumental as they would at that age.

It’s very observant about odd growing up things like not wanting to be called “quiet.” Kayla is not really a nerd per se, she just hasn’t mastered acting cool or making friends. She’s at a little bit younger, more innocent stage than most of the other kids. She has a round face and big eyes like a cartoon avatar on one of the apps she stares and swipes at literally most of the day. She always has a little acne. She’s the only one at the pool party with a one piece swimming suit. She’s developed neither the interest in sex that the boys have nor the skills to reject them. The one time a peer gives her good advice (that boy you think is cute, he’s a dick, he dumped a girl for not giving him nude photos) she uses it as intel on how to get his attention.

Aiden (Luke Prael, BOARDING SCHOOL) is a great example of how the movie can give us both a subjective Kayla and more objective grown up perspective. We see him in dub-step-accompanied slow motion as she admires his award-winning eyes squinting out from beneath his bangs. He has a Thrasher Magazine t-shirt and some kind of James Dean rebel vibe. But also he’s just some skinny little dipshit. We watch him playing video games and not picking up on Kayla’s rehearsed attempt to hit on him until she says the phrase “dirty photos” and he perks up like that dog that says “SQUIRREL!” And then when class starts up again it’s like the spell of his boner is broken and he goes right back to puffing his cheeks out and making fart noises. We can see that this kid and the girls Kayla wants to be friends with are dumb little assholes that she shouldn’t care about, and also we can see why she does.

Kayla lives alone with her dad (Josh Hamilton, J. EDGAR), who always seems flustered about how to be a good dad, but also seems like a very good dad. He never even gets that scene where he gets fed up and turns strict. He’s just a nice guy who thinks his daughter is wonderful and wants her to see it too. Because this is eighth grade, though, Kayla acts like he’s the worst dude ever. She blocks him out at the dinner table with headphones and her phone screen, treats every bit of conversation like an interrogation, gets made at him for saying things or not saying anything or having a look on his face. But it’s still a sweet relationship. He’s a little taken aback, but he gets it. He’s hurt, but amused.

To me the most harrowing scene is the pool party. The perfectly named popular girl Kennedy Graves (Catherine Oliviere, THE WEAVER OF RAVELOE) has a million beautiful friends and transparently hates Kayla, who was invited to the party by Kennedy’s mom (Missy Yager, HAPPY DEATH DAY), due either to cluelessnness about the evolution of her daughter’s social life, or a crush on Kayla’s dad, or maybe a genuine attempt to get her daughter to be nice to people. Kayla knows the score and at first tries to get out of it, but then bites the bullet when she hears Aiden will be there. The girl’s got balls.

Coming through the sliding door, down the wooden stairs and into the gaggle of skinny 13 year olds in bikinis laughing and splashing and seemingly comfortable with themselves and each other feels as daring as wearing a wire or going on live TV or jumping off of a speeding vehicle. It’s clear that none of them are friends with her, they won’t understand why she’s there, and they aren’t the type to try to make her feel welcome. But she gets into the pool and tries to act like she belongs and can only talk to Kennedy’s Eddie Deezen-esque cousin Gabe (Jake Ryan, MOONRISE KINGDOM, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, ISLE OF DOGS – jesus, the filmography on this kid already), the other partygoer who got in on a technicality.

Eighth grade is about to end. Of course high school could be worse, but it could be a good chance for a reset. It’s such a relief when Kayla goes to an orientation thing and the high school student she’s assigned to shadow, Olivia (Emily Robinson, ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE) turns out to be a total sweetheart who immediately hugs her. Of course you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I think Olivia represents an optimistic, It Gets Better kind of view of growing up. There will be new challenges, but also new and better people to meet.

The whole movie feels very authentic, and I’ve heard from experts (women) that male comedian turned director Bo Burnham has accurately portrayed a female experience. I wondered how he could not only seem to get into the mind of a young girl, but a modern one whose life exists mostly on Instagram and Youtube and shit. Then I found out he’s only 27, and broke into comedy with viral Youtube videos when he was 16, so he’s not as removed from that life as I assumed.

(I have a rule about younger people. If they were at least born before Tim Burton’s BATMAN then I should be able to talk to them like a peer. Burnham was born two months after DICK TRACY.)

It’s kind of cool that the story of Kayla can feel so universally human and yet so different from my childhood. I sometimes feel grateful that Youtube didn’t exist when I was a kid, imagining what kind of humiliating ways I would’ve attempted to express myself. But then I look at Kayla making her videos that are probly not being watched by more than a few people, that attempt to impart empowering messages that she’s heard somewhere and clearly doesn’t know from experience, and I realize how much I like her anyway. I’ve seen Youtube comments before so I’m sure they would say some mean shit about her, but she seems very sincere about wanting to help people, wanting to be the cool friend to someone that she wishes someone was to her. Even if she’s a phony.

In some sense the videos are really about teaching herself. When she encourages people to be brave she’s the one who ends up doing it. During the party, before she goes off and hides in an empty room, she takes the mic to do karaoke. We don’t get to hear how she does or see how badly anyone reacts, only to celebrate the victory of her just saying “fuck it” and being vulnerable in front of these dicks. And I think (SPOILER?) the lesson she learns at the end of the movie is really the subject of her video that opened the film.

It’s weird, I can’t really think of another movie specifically about middle school. There are so many teen movies where they can get away with having actors in their twenties. With this one they could never do that, they’d be better off trying mo-cap, because they all have to look like kids who don’t realize they’re kids.

When I think about it this grade was pretty pivotal in growing up for me. (VERN AGE SPOILERS COMING UP.) I thought Dead Kennedys were the greatest, tried to bleach my hair, made up a punk name, got sent to the counselor for the drawings on my science book, knew other kids were doing drugs, heard who was supposedly having sex, saw part of THE EVIL DEAD and ACTION JACKSON at some girl’s birthday party in her apartment building’s cabana room but only appreciated the latter, was told by the wrestling coach that he was worried I had quit the team to hang around a bad crowd, got called “fag” alot, got the cops called on me because a lady thought I threw a rock at her car, thought I was some kind of misunderstood outcast even though I had good friends and family, became obsessed with Public Enemy, knew a kid from school who slipped into Snoqualmie Falls and died – at least, I had talked to him once, about Public Enemy. And I can kind of remember what it felt like to be so full of energy and raw emotion and how completely clueless I was about all of it, but I know that little sparks of those things helped grow me into the person I am today. And of course I still listen to It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back regularly, and Dead Kennedys once in a blue moon, and sometimes I remember that I’m way older than the people when they made those albums, but instinctively take the music as wisdom from the elders.

If Kayla’s high school experience is like mine she’ll spend a year trying to figure out how to be a normal kid, then decide to go in the opposite direction, and find herself somewhere out there. Good luck, fictional girl, you’ll be okay.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/31/eighth-grade/feed/8Mission: Impossible – Fallouthttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/30/mission-impossible-fallout/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/30/mission-impossible-fallout/#commentsMon, 30 Jul 2018 18:44:12 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32276On the way home from the new MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE I mentioned to a grocery store checker that I had just seen and enjoyed it. He asked if I was a big fan of “the original series” and as we discussed this I realized that he just meant the other movies. He’d forgotten it started as […]

]]>On the way home from the new MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE I mentioned to a grocery store checker that I had just seen and enjoyed it. He asked if I was a big fan of “the original series” and as we discussed this I realized that he just meant the other movies. He’d forgotten it started as a TV series until I mentioned it.

This is one of those things as you get a little older, you lose track of how much time has passed. It also happened with JURASSIC WORLD a few years ago. In my mind JURASSIC PARK was an ongoing series that had made it to part 4. But to a whole generation it was holy shit remember that movie we saw in our youth, now a million years later can you believe they’re bringing it back for a new version, oh the nostalgia?

And lately I’ve noticed people declaring the stealth greatness of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE series, as if this wasn’t a thing you would be aware of just from watching popular mainstream movies. It reminded me of when FAST FIVE came out and suddenly a whole bunch of critics picked up that those movies were fun. Yeah, no shit. The only other people in on this secret are the, you know, however many paying customers it takes to get a series to part 5.

Well, shit. Nobody be alarmed, but according to these figures I’m looking at we’ve been watching these MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies for 22 god damn years. That’s almost as long as the original show had been off the air when the movies started. The series is a month older than the guy currently playing Spider-man. I still think the first one is the best, and there was that time in 2000 when I was a little disappointed that the second one wasn’t the type of John Woo movie I was hoping it would be, but also I enjoyed it as the other lesser type of John Woo movie, and it has grown on me since. Every other chance I got – 2006, 2011, 2015 – I was satisfied and excited by the new chapter.

Now for the first time we have a returning director – Christopher McQuarrie, Academy Award winning writer of THE USUAL SUSPECTS, director of THE WAY OF THE GUN, JACK REACHER (first recipient of the 5.0 Action Comprehensibility rating) and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION. And though that violates what I once thought was the main purpose of the series (a new take by a new director every time out), McQuarrie (who also did uncredited rewrites on the set of GHOST PROTOCOL) has enough experience in the format to make a 100 proof summation of all the series hallmarks. Especially the ones that involve spectacular action sequences.

Any of the M:Is can stand on their own, but there’s some continuity. Ethan (Tom Cruise, LEGEND) and Luther (Ving Rhames, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS) are in all of them, and later Benji (Simon Pegg, LAND OF THE DEAD) and Julia (Michelle Monaghan, CONSTANTINE) repeat. But this is the first direct sequel, following up on the villain Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, HARRY BROWN), building off of things that happened in the last one that I didn’t really remember (but it didn’t really matter).

I like that it has references or echoes of little things from all the other installments. The helicopter action scene that seemed so crazy at the time of part 1 is dwarfed by a way more crazy one (so intense they were able to cut the part that ended the trailer without me even noticing). Hunt’s part 2 skill for free climbing comes in handy. Luther tells Ilsa the story of Ethan trying to get out of the game and live a normal life as a married man (part 3). There’s a little speech about how many times Hunt has been betrayed or disavowed by his country, an accurate description of the series. Along with ROGUE NATION’s villain and his organization we thankfully have the return of that chapter’s breakout star, rogue MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, HERCULES). And I’ve read about other things I didn’t pick up on, like a supporting character being related to a character from way back in part 1.

Not that it doesn’t have its own thing going on. It’s the longest one by 15 minutes. It has a new cinematographer (Rob Hardy, BLITZ, EX MACHINA, ANNIHILATION) and kind of a darker sound courtesy of Lorne Balfe, a Hans Zimmer padawan who recently caught my ear with his needlessly good score for . The early scenes go from surprising grimness to a joke almost out of CHARLIE’S ANGELS, as if to say don’t worry guys, this is gonna be fun.

This time out Ethan, Luther and Benji are after some plutonium that fell into the hands of The Apostles, formerly The Syndicate, when Ethan wouldn’t let Luther die for the cause. The CIA (Angela Bassett, CRITTERS 4) forces them to bring along her operative August Walker (Henry Cavill, HELLRAISER: HELLWORLD), who has a not-quite-friendly rivalry with Ethan. Obviously we will bob and weave through a maze of twists and turns and convoluted plans that include disguises, elaborate hoaxes, switcheroos, sleight of hand, betrayal, bluffing, and handy devices. One theme is that they’ve painted themselves into a very dangerous corner with no clue what to do next and at least one person there is ready to start panicking but Ethan is saying don’t worry, he’ll figure something out, and even he seems a little unsure. But he will figure something out. He is “the literal manifestation of destiny,” according to Hunley (Alec Baldwin, THE SHADOW) in a moment of Just How Badass Is He? poetry.

You may have heard some less flowery but similarly hyperbolic superlatives about the action scenes. Many have said “the best action since FURY ROAD,” which people tend to take as “as good as FURY ROAD,” which is not fair for any movie to have to live up to. Being partial to martial arts I’m not gonna say this has better action than KILL ZONE 2 or THE VILLAINESS, but let’s not worry about ranking. It’s definitely true that it’s a movie with spectacular stunt-based action that would stand out in this or any year.

One of the most insane and unusual stunt sequences is near the beginning and is just to transport the team to the site of their mission. In the tradition of ROGUE NATION’s underwater scene that I assumed was a special effect but it was actually real comes FALLOUT’s H.A.L.O. jump sequence. According to USA Today “Between training for the stunt and shooting, Cruise jumped from a C-17 military plane a total of 106 times to get the three takes he and director Christopher McQuarrie wanted.” And by the way the ones they filmed had to be done near sunset. I bet everybody was real happy about that decision.

There’s a car and motorcycle chase that’s definitely among the most thrilling I’ve seen in a while. There’s a rooftop foot chase where Cruise is running so fast I don’t understand how he doesn’t trip over himself. And I don’t think any of those are the sequence people are referring to when they call one of them the best [whatever] since [whenever].

The second unit director/stunt coordinator is Wade Eastwood (no relation), a Dolph Lundgren stunt double who did second unit for BRIDGE OF DRAGONS before apparently impressing Tom Cruise enough to do EDGE OF TOMORROW, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION, JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK and THE MUMMY. Fight coordinator/trainer Wolfgang Stegemann is also the go-to guy for this era of Cruise, having worked with him on ROGUE NATION, NEVER GO BACK and THE MUMMY. The fighting is very good for a non martial arts based movie. Very powerful looking moves, especially in that restroom scene hyped up in the trailer. You know I’m a fan of public restroom fight scenes and once again I must note that it would be cool if the hero stopped and washed his hands afterwards. Some day. Additionally I will point out that McQuarrie and Cruise’s JACK REACHER had an excellent fight in a very small one-person bathroom.

And furthermore there’s a weird thing here where to some bystanders it looks like the IMF dudes are doing each other in a restroom stall, and my audience laughed in the same way they would for a “ha ha, they’re mistaken for gay” joke in a Michael Bay movie. But there’s a bit of a twist on it when it turns out the people who misunderstand what they’re seeing are gay themselves and cheer them on instead of being scandalized.

Anyway that’s a good fight but my favorite move is Ilsa’s when she appears out of nowhere to hook her leg over a guy’s wrist and pull his gun down before he shoots Ethan. She loves those leg scissors.

Remember back when Tom Holland was starting kindergarten and we would complain that the Mission: Impossible show was about a team and why are the movies so focused on this one guy being awesome? They’ve long since overcome that problem, and it’s always satisfying to see the teamwork. Here they use one of my favorite tropes of action camaraderie: after the team pulls through to extract Ethan from a precarious situation they simply nod to each other. Ethan’s nod says “I want you to know that I appreciate you saving my ass even though you know that I respect your skills and professionalism enough that of course I had no doubt that you would.” And Benji’s says “Yep.”

There’s alot of heavy exposition and light banter and some of the intrigue is a little hard to follow. But it all comes together and ends up in a satisfying place with just-exhausting-enough thrills, opportunities for all the characters to contribute, one of the best villains of the series, unexpected closure to a major storyline from previous episodes and a statement about what makes Ethan and the team the type of heroes the world needs. It’s not any kind of drastic reinvention, but it’s such a muscular and agile version of what we love about the series that it feels stronger than ever. I like all the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLEs, and this is definitely one of the best.

Additional notes:

When Luther says that Ethan has only truly loved two women in the time he’s known him, I felt for Nyah (Thandie Newton) from part Woo. Maybe that was just a fling after a hell of a flirtation (involving high speed car dancing) but jesus, she poisoned herself and was ready to jump off a cliff to save the world. I guess the vacation they went on at the end must’ve gone really bad and the relationship self destructed. They had to disavow it. Or maybe it went great but then she ghost protocoled him?

Although I enjoy the continuity in this one I hope they continue to mix things up and let the movies stand alone. But if we’re gonna connect them all I need to reiterate that Maggie Q and Paula Patton were cool in their installments and they should show up again. But Ilsa is one of the most exciting characters in the series so I’m proud of her achievement as the first female combatant to be in more than one installment.

Also I really liked Jeremy Renner as Brandt in 4 and 5. They left him out of this one because he had to film INFINITY WAR (the second part, I guess), so hopefully he’ll be back. And Benji or somebody can say “I wish you were on our team last time because we had this CIA guy instead and he was the worst.”

Speaking of which, I hope people will be able to get past Kryptonian politics to acknowledge that Henry Cavill is fucking awesome. I don’t see how anybody could deny that he makes a great Superman, but of course they will. He was funny and charming in THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., but we as a society failed to see it. So here he is now and he grew a mustache and everything. Give the man some credit.

It’s kind of amazing that I saw the trailer before every single movie I saw in a theater for months and not once did I ever spot that the big bathroom fist fight between Cruise and Cavill is actually a cleverly disguised scene where the two of them together are fighting a third person (stuntman Liang Yang). That’s some creative editing. I don’t know why they wanted to hide that, but it’s impressive work.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/30/mission-impossible-fallout/feed/63Small Soldiershttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/26/small-soldiers/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/26/small-soldiers/#commentsThu, 26 Jul 2018 18:07:37 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32218July 10, 1998 SMALL SOLDIERS is an effects-driven, Spielberg-produced, released-on-July-10th sci-fi movie. But it’s about killer toys (or at least potentially killer toys?) and the hero is a kid and it’s not a CHILD’S PLAY movie (it’s rated PG-13) so I’m not sure it was really seen as a movie for adults. To me and […]

SMALL SOLDIERS is an effects-driven, Spielberg-produced, released-on-July-10th sci-fi movie. But it’s about killer toys (or at least potentially killer toys?) and the hero is a kid and it’s not a CHILD’S PLAY movie (it’s rated PG-13) so I’m not sure it was really seen as a movie for adults. To me and surely many others who saw it the exciting thing was that it was directed by Joe Dante, who hadn’t had a film since MATINEE five years earlier. And with him and Spielberg doing a movie about a young man fighting out of control small things raising a ruckus in a small town, obviously everybody had visions of Gremlins chomping on their heads.

Alan (Gregory Smith, HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN) is a maybe 14 year old kid who works at his dad (Kevin Dunn, MARKED FOR DEATH, also in GODZILLA, ALMOST HEROES and SNAKE EYES that summer)’s toy store, one of those ones that only sells wooden blocks and airplanes and shit, nothing based on cartoons or movies (so there’s not an anti-GODZILLA in-joke here). His dad actually has a specific “no war toys” policy. But one day his friend the delivery driver (Dick Miller, of course) has another store’s shipment of new high tech talking action figures called the Commando Elite. Alan thinks they would sell better than Lincoln Logs or whatever and convinces him to let him take a set.

What he doesn’t know, but we do, is that this new line from Heartland Toy Company was created under pressure from their new corporate overlords GloboTech Industries and rushed into production using computer chips originally created for the military. So these gung-ho soldier dolls can talk and move but also learn, and they really believe in their mission of destroying the monster dolls known as Gorgonites, led by the serene and peaceful Archer (voice of Frank Langella, BRAINSCAN), who befriends Alan when the Commando Elite escape their boxes, wreck the store and send the other Gorgonites into hiding.

This can’t just be about a kid trying to stop a toy war, so there’s also teenage awkwardness. The literal and figurative girl next door Christy (Kirsten Dunst, THE CROW: SALVATION) comes into the store, wants to buy a Commando Elite for her brother, and she’s nice so they sort of become friends even though she seems to be above his station socially. She helps him clean up the store and soon learns that they’re dealing with an army of artificially intelligent toys and then they’re in the shit together.

The toys are characters in their own right, maybe a little more developed than Gremlins, though less than, like, Woody and Buzz. The Commando Elite are led by Chip Hazard (Tommy Lee Jones, THE PARK IS MINE) and the credits playfully point out that the rest are cast members from THE DIRTY DOZEN: George Kennedy, Jim Brown, Ernest Borgnine, Clint Walker, plus Bruce Dern because Richard Jaeckel had just died and had to be replaced. I didn’t pick up on that at all, because they’re playing characters more along the lines of the Rambo cartoon – bloodthirsty muscleheads with names like Brick Bazooka, Butch Meathook and Kip Killigan. They all have dickish, slanted eyebrows. One has a mohawk.

I remember thinking these fictional toys were ugly, but accurate to the style of the era. This time around I thought their designs were more appealing than I remembered. They’re like a foot tall and very detailed sculpts, the commandos have similar but delineated personalities, and Archer is kind of a nature warrior fantasy character in the vein of AVATAR. I can see how these would be pretty cool to a kid (one younger than Alan, though. I wonder why they didn’t want the hero to be of toy-playing age?)

Look at this fuckin guy.

But when Archer finds the rest of his Gorgonites I remembered oh yeah, these are the ones that really suck. The bulbous Shrek-meets-Frankenstein’s-monster one, the trying-way-too-hard stitched-together cyborg hunchback one, and especially (oh jesus I hate looking at this one) the big smile, crazy eyes, dreadlocks thing named “Insaniac.” Please throw that one away. Do not donate to Goodwill. Melt it down. Nobody needs this one. Also, I don’t know which one it is but Wikipedia mentions one called “Stench: the gas-passing Gorgonite.”

They have wacky voices too but it’s cool that they’re voiced by the three members of Spinal Tap (also noted in the credits).

Unlike the Gremlins, who are basically anarchists or hedonists or tricksters, the Commando Elite are on a specific mission of “destroying the Gorgonite enemy.” According to their computer chips that’s the right thing to do. They escalate the battle by getting into the garage and using power tools as weapons. They drug Christy’s parents, played by Phil Hartman and Wendy Schaal. (After the credits there’s an outtake and a dedication to Hartman, who had died on May 28th.)

It’s one of those movies where the far-fetched premise is easy to accept, but the basic reality that’s supposed to ground it feels a little too far off. Like, okay, high tech toys malfunction and fight a battle – no problem. But the kid who runs a family toy store is friends with the delivery truck driver and he stops to hang out in the middle of his route and lets him open up and play with some expensive new toys destined for a different store, even before he’s talked into letting him steal a shipment of them and pay him back later? I hate stuff like that. Make the normal life parts seem accurate. Most people watching have experience in normal life.

The effects by Stan Winston are very impressive though. I thought it was amazing how photo-realistic they looked in most shots, and it turns out (like JURASSIC PARK) this is partly because they’re using some puppets. A vintage featurette on the DVD shows how even in many shots where they’re walking around they’re being controlled by teams of puppeteers (rods later erased). Of course there’s also plenty of ILM animation in big action moments like a soldier dragging from Alan’s bike (I feel like he would’ve noticed), and Dante has said in interviews that they ended up using CG about two thirds of the time.

There’s some routine business about the kids having to solve the problem by themselves because no one would believe them, and eventually the adults discover that they’re telling the truth when their house is under siege. It’s kind of weird to have this movie competing with the size-oriented spectacle movies of the summer when this is as dramatic as it gets. It literally takes place in… well, not the backyard. Mostly the front yard. I like Alan’s mom (Ann Magnuson, TEQUILA SUNRISE) hitting firebombs back with a tennis racket. Also there’s a good moment where Christy shows up on a rider mower and chops up some commandos.

The screenplay is credited to Gavin Scott (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), Adam Rifkin (THE LAST MOVIE STAR) and the team of Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio (ALADDIN), who will have another Summer of ’98 movie, THE MASK OF ZORRO. Reportedly Spielberg’s sister Anne (BIG) also worked on it, but was not credited. To me Rifkin is the most interesting name on there, because this is a guy who had directed movies like THE INVISIBLE MANIAC, THE DARK BACKWARD and PSYCHO COP RETURNS. As a director his most mainstream movie up until that point had been THE CHASE, but he had started having some success as a screenwriter, including for Gore Verbinski’s first film, MOUSEHUNT.

Dante is a deservingly beloved director, mainly because of GREMLINS and its sequel, but also PIRANHA, THE HOWLING, his part of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE, EXPLORERS, INNERSPACE, THE ‘BURBS and MATINEE, and his status as a sort of ambassador of the “monster kid” generation and the Roger Corman alumni through interviews and Trailers From Hell. He’s kind of an old fashioned movie nerd from the days when Universal Monsters were Star Wars, and there’s definitely something square about his sensibilities. Look at Billy in GREMLINS, Ben in EXPLORERS, or this kid here – so many of his heroes are kind of the blandly regular surburban kid, not a total nerd but definitely not a cool kid. We’re told that Alan is a troublemaker who has been kicked out of multiple schools, and in a deleted scene he gets threatened by a teacher for pulling a water fountain related prank, but it doesn’t really feel believable. This kid seems so vanilla.

Christy of course has that nice girl charm that Dunst is so good at, and I like that they try to make her a little unpredictable by saying she’s into Led Zeppelin and having her complain about a TV show that everybody else likes, but I’m not sure she sells it. And I always kinda hated this type of story where the wimpy hero wins over the popular girl from a cool guy boyfriend (Jonathan Bouck, PARENTHOOD) even if it’s funny that said boyfriend runs away from toys and gets set on fire and has to take his pants off. It’s just too on-the-nose-wish-fulfillment for a little boy mentality, and as time goes on it seems more and more like a bad idea to give future “nice guy”s those expectations.

Whereas the town in GREMLINS had an exaggerated Frank Capra charm (all the better to be terrorized by the little bastards), and the one in EXPLORERS was a boring place to escape from, and the one in THE ‘BURBS was meant to show the fear of evil lurking behind a facade of plainness, this one is just kind of a generic place where a family TV show might take place. It doesn’t have a good look to it or feel true-to-life enough to be relatable.

But I think there’s a subtle subversive streak underneath this flavorlessness. At least subtle compared to Dante’s anti-war Masters of Horror episode HOMECOMING. The greed of the corporate behemoth behind these toys is broad and obvious. The moral lesson of Alan causing all this trouble by violating his dad’s no-war-toys rule in an attempt to make more money is fairly standard. But I like the idea that the “Commando Elite” toys, intended as good guys, are a threat just by virtue of their programming, following their concept through to its logical conclusion. That chip sees those muscles and those guns and it knows what to do.

And though the Gorgonites are intended by their designer (David Cross, DR. DOLITTLE 2) to be good guys, the crass CEO (Denis Leary, WHO’S THE MAN?) designates them bad guys just because they’re monsters. Their true nature comes through, though. Obviously Dante is gonna side with the monsters.

I suppose it goes without saying that they made a bunch of toys based on SMALL SOLDIERS. Most of them were smaller and less dangerous than the ones in the movie. According to Dante, the studio had first wanted an “edgy movie for teens,” but then pressured him to make it more kiddy and cut out some action at the last minute. The Hollywood Reporter hollywood reported that Burger King executives were furious when they found out this movie they made 25 million kid’s meal toys of had been rated PG-13. They’d never done that before, so they had to rework their advertising and include a disclaimer that said “While toys are suitable for children of all ages, the movie Small Soldiers may contain material that is inappropriate for younger children.”

In his essay At War with Cultural Violence: The Critical Reception of SMALL SOLDIERS, Jonathan Rosenbaum (who compares the movie to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, released two weeks later) wrote, “The essential auteur of SMALL SOLDIERS was perceived by many American spectators to be Burger King, a not-­unreasonable assumption given the ﬁlm’s promotional tie-in deals, not to mention the fact that, as I eventually discovered from Dante himself, Burger King had the ﬁnal cut.”

Like GODZILLA and ARMAGEDDON, SMALL SOLDIERS also had an album. But theirs was more in the tradition of JUDGMENT NIGHT, because (with the exception of Edwin Starr’s original version of “War”) they all combine rappers with classic rock songs. For example they have a “War” cover by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Henry Rollins, Tom Morello and Flea, and “Love is a Battlefield” by Pat Benatar, Queen Latifah and DJ Kay Gee.

What the fuck? I had no idea, but apparently it has The Pretenders doing “My City Was Gone” with Kool Keith. That’s pretty representative of this movie’s mix of cool and odd and not necessarily great.

1998 stuff: Bonding over their mutual hatred of a saccharine mainstream show called Family of Five, Alan says he’s “more of an X-Files guy” and Christy says “Ah, the truth is out there.” (Which is how a dad trying to show that he’s hip would respond in my opinion but no judgment, she seems nice.) So both this and CAN’T HARDLY WAIT have characters who love The X-Files during the summer when the X-FILES movie came out. In this case it might be a detail meant to explain why he’s quick to understand this crazy thing is happening (along with his “QUESTION REALITY” bumper sticker).

Archer uses Alan’s computer to learn about the world, and he calls Alan “The Keeper of the Encarta.” Hooray for CD-ROMs.

“Wannabe” by Spice Girls plays at one point.

Though there’s not a reference in the movie itself, the making-of featurette (like so many other things this summer) plays off of GODZILLA’s tagline:

I was surprised to notice that Christina Ricci, already seen this summer in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, THE OPPOSITE OF SEX and BUFFALO ’66, voices some of the off-brand-Barbie-type dolls that Christy collects and that get Frankensteined to life in mutilated versions which are kind of fun but have you ever seen the movie TOY STORY because I have and it did the same shit but better. The other ones are voiced by Sarah Michelle Buffy the Vampire Slayer Gellar.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/26/small-soldiers/feed/19Pi (a.k.a. π)http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/25/pi/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/25/pi/#commentsWed, 25 Jul 2018 17:42:33 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32186July 10, 1998 PI might be the most impactful of the summer of ’98 indies, at least in the sense that it introduced filmmakers who continue to be relevant 20 years later. It’s one of the old fashioned, scrappy, less-than-a-million dollar shoe-strings-and-boot-straps indie debuts, by which I mean it’s in black and white. Actually, 16mm […]

PI might be the most impactful of the summer of ’98 indies, at least in the sense that it introduced filmmakers who continue to be relevant 20 years later. It’s one of the old fashioned, scrappy, less-than-a-million dollar shoe-strings-and-boot-straps indie debuts, by which I mean it’s in black and white. Actually, 16mm high-contrast black-and-white reversal film. Vincent Gallo claims he fired Dick Pope as cinematographer of BUFFALO ’66 because reversal stock was too hard for him, but here’s director Darren Aranofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, two Mr. Nobodies out of nowhere and they know how to use it. I like this kind of look, the grain dancing around, creating shadowy faces. It’s so opposite of how low budget movies usually look now that they’re digital.

Co-writer Sean Gullette (TRAITORS) plays Max, a genius mathematician obsessed with his thesis that “everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.” When he was a kid, he says, he stared into the sun, and this gave him an ability to notice numbers everywhere. He’s fixated on discovering patterns in long sequences, a hobby that first-time director Aranofsky has fun trying to make seem cinematic through fast editing, the cool guy electronic dance music of the era and pre-THE-MATRIX lo res on-screen strings of numbers. Also he figures out how to get some foot chases in there (Max thinks he’s being followed).

Max is a loner. He lives in a small, cluttered apartment in New York’s Chinatown, and his only friends seem to be Sol (Mark Margolis, DELTA FORCE 2), a retired math professor he visits to play Go (that Chinese game with the black and white stones on a wooden grid board) with and discuss that one time his studies brought him a mysterious 216 digit number he could never decode. You could argue that Max is also friends with the little girl (Kristyn Mae-Anne Lao) who likes to ask him math problems and see him calculate the answers off the top of his head, but he mostly seems impatient with her. He’s even ruder to the pretty Pakistani neighbor (Samia Shoaib, SUBURBIA) who brings him food and tries to look after him. Her obvious interest in him is a bigger mystery than the infinite digits of pi could ever be.

But she’s also not the only one he’s always trying to brush off. There’s also Marcy Dawson (Pamela Hart, NEXT STOP WONDERLAND), a phony-nice lady who keeps calling pushily trying to set up an unexplained appointment with him. And there’s Lenny (Ben Shenkman, ERASER), a guy who keeps trying to talk to him at a diner when he’s obviously trying to be left alone to circle stuff on the stock numbers in the paper. Lenny is so accurate – I’m very familiar with trying to do something (in my case writing a movie review like this in my notebook on a bus) when some stranger wants to start an inane conversation. It’s a funny thing, an unwinnable clash between two opposing personality types, and this guy is perfect at professing to understand Max wanting to be left alone, then sliding into “It’s just that…”

And he keeps bringing up Judaism (Max doesn’t practice) so there’s a sense of “have you heard the good word?” type salesmanship here, and nobody wants to deal with that. But I love the moment when Lenny explains his study of the Torah, how letters in Hebrew represent numbers that form math problems – and it’s so undeniably up Max’s alley that he reluctantly grumbles, “That’s kind of interesting.”

So he goes from trying to use math to predict the global economy to trying to use it to discover the name of God. As you do. Also he gets mixed up with the most intimidating group of Hasidic Jews I’ve seen in a movie.

It’s one of those descent-into-madness type movies. He has headaches that keep getting worse. He keeps popping pills. Eventually he flips out and shaves his head. I should mention that he’s doing some weird experiment involving computer chips and wires, and for some reason ants keep crawling on his chip. Sometimes he finds slime. One time he tastes it.

ENDING SPOILERS: In the end he drills into his own brain – the thinking man’s Rambo self-surgery scene. It goes black and for half a second you believe it’s a fucked up nihilistic ending, until it continues and he’s alive and successfully removed the math part of his brain. I suppose one question it asks is if you could remove your biggest obsession could it improve your life? Of course it’s sad because math was his life, but honestly it seems like he’ll be happier now. Make real friends. Enjoy Pakistani food.

But I also see it as stopping your worry about having all the answers so you can enjoy the problem. What good is it to have numbers that represent the parts of life if you only ever experience them and not what they describe? I sometimes scare myself thinking about the question of existence – how could life be created by somebody? But also how could it not be? If there’s a beginning of time what was before time and If there’s not then what the hell does that mean? There’s not an answer to this that makes any sense and I figure that’s the limits of our thinking. Why are we conscious enough to be able to ask the question but never to understand the answer?

Poor Max was spending his whole life stuck stressing about shit like that, but with the stubborn certainty that he almost had the answer. What a horrible way to live.

Even in this summer of notable indies, PI seems out of place, from another time when things were sloppier, more home made, more analog. It reminds me of black and white movies like ERASERHEAD and TETSUO THE IRON MAN. It’s a very different New York from MR. JEALOUSY or THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO – no rich people, no hip people. He’s an academic, but not a witty one. And I don’t think there are any white people in the movie who aren’t Jewish. And though it’s about what goes on in his head, the style is visceral, in your face, aggressive.

All of Aranofsky’s subsequent films would be much slicker, but coming from the same place. I especially kept thinking of mother!, which also starts out feeling like possibly the real world and then spiraling into a crazy fever dream with unexplained wounds, biological things growing on inanimate objects, religious and philosophical symbolism. Jennifer Lawrence found a wound growing in her floor and this guy finds a brain in a subway station and pokes it with a pen. There is plenty of PI in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM‘s closeups of eyes and drugs and it’s killer referigerator, and even in NOAH‘s creation sequence. I suppose the movie is very late ’90s in its music, which will go hand in hand with BLADE, THE MATRIX, RUN LOLA RUN, etc. Otherwise it’s kind of out of time. (Glad there’s no Sugar Ray and no X-Files references.)

I think Aranofsky’s body of work holds its own against other class of ’98 indie directors Don Roos, Noah Baumbach, Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley. I don’t know if I’d like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM anymore, but I liked THE FOUNTAIN and NOAH and mother! and I loved THE WRESTLER and BLACK SWAN. He’s unusual in that he’s grown in budget and scope but has continued to stay on the arthouse side of things his whole career. He’s never gone into television or any sort of franchise filmmaking, but he did develop a Batman movie before Nolan and THE WOLVERINE before Mangold, so it’s not for lack of trying.

Debuting cinematographer Libatique also went on to an impressive body of work that includes most of Aranofsky’s films plus JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS, INSIDE MAN, IRON MAN, STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, CHI-RAQ and more. And it’s not surprising, because the guy behind the camera here is clearly excited and inventive and hungry, bringing energy to this you-would-think inherently static subject matter. There are lots of cool shots spinning around his head or attached in front of his face as he walks or vibrating to represent the chaos in his brain, and they never feel spastic or dizzying to me.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/25/pi/feed/16Armageddonhttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/24/armageddon-2/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/24/armageddon-2/#commentsTue, 24 Jul 2018 17:20:08 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32141July 1, 1998 “There was some criticism that I made NASA look dumb in certain places. In fact if you heard some of these asteroid theories of what they are thinking of doing, it just sounds asinine.” –Michael Bay ARMAGEDDON is Michael Bay’s third movie, but in some sense it’s the one where he revealed […]

“There was some criticism that I made NASA look dumb in certain places. In fact if you heard some of these asteroid theories of what they are thinking of doing, it just sounds asinine.” –Michael Bay

ARMAGEDDON is Michael Bay’s third movie, but in some sense it’s the one where he revealed his true face to the world. There were plenty of examples of his style and character in BAD BOYS and THE ROCK, but it was ARMAGEDDON that first presented the full breadth of his trademarks: awesome awesome macho bros, pretty pretty sunsets, government employees portrayed as insufferable weiners even though they’re in the right, spinning cameras, haphazard editing all over the fucking place, chaotic mish-mashes of explosions and sparks and machinery and debris and smoke and crap, beautiful shots of people in various locations around the world, weirdly hateful characters presented as cutesy comic relief, an army of highly qualified writers seemingly locked in a cage and forced to duct tape a bunch of dumb ideas into the most unwieldy structure they can come up with that has a running time at least 30 minutes longer than the story has earned, and of course an ensemble of talented actors improvising jokes with no regard for any sort of desired rhythm or tone of storytelling.

In 1998 I hated this fucking movie. It was one of my big disconnects with mainstream audiences, following BATMAN FOREVER and INDEPENDENCE DAY, giant hit summer blockbusters that most people liked but I couldn’t stand. It seems like many of those people have disavowed it over the years, but it definitely has a following. I have one personal friend and a few internet acquaintances who consider it among their favorites. I’m not sure how much of that is ironic.

I guess I can partly understand in that it stands out as a particularly crazy example of the form. Before we even meet most of the main characters we already have

1) A space-eye view of an asteroid destroying the dinosaurs (narrated by Charlton Heston!)

2) An exploding logo

and

3) A spectacular astronautical disaster. It’s the only movie I know of that wants you to have a profound and overwhelming patriotic reverence at the sight of a Space Shuttle, but also to whoo-hoo and high five your buddies when it explodes and sends seventeen types of debris at the camera like an old school show-offy 3D movie. ARMAGEDDON believes that you are in absolute awe of anything having to do with NASA, and also that you definitely weren’t traumatized by watching the Challenger astronauts disintegrate on TV as a kid. In fact it thinks you were disappointed that that shit didn’t blow up cool enough.

On the famous Criterion edition commentary track, Bay credits the idea to an unnamed “very young writer” who “rewrote 53 pages in two days and I read the script and it was pure shit,” but when Bay told him that the opening was boring and “you’ve gotta grab the audience by the balls,” this writer pitched blowing up the Space Shuttle. And I guess we can infer that Bay considered that to be a worthwhile ball grab.

The main character, arguably, is The Best Damn Deep Core Driller There Is Harry Stamper, played by The Best Damn Hollywood Actor There Is Bruce Willis. When NASA (Billy Bob Thornton, ON DEADLY GROUND) figures out that an asteroid the size of Texas is about to knock Earth the fuck out and the one way they can maybe stop it is to send guys to drill a big hole and put a nuclear bomb in it, they make some calls (and probly type “best damn deep core driller there is” into Yahoo! or AltaVista) and find out Harry is the guy. Next thing you know he and his rowdy team of macho oil jockeys are being briefly trained to astronaut shit up so they can save the world, maybe.

The part of the movie that I most understand the appeal of is this chunk after a bunch of buildings get destroyed but before any amateurs go into space. As Affleck puts it on that same commentary track, it follows “the sort of DIRTY DOZEN model… a gang of rough and tumble everyday guys that are needed to do a job.” Bay also calls them “everyday guys,” but his take is that “That’s what makes this movie fun. It’s the everyday guy given the opportunity to save the world or just sit back and watch it end.” So, not just that underdogs get a chance to be heroes, but that they could end all human life if they chose to, that power is what makes it fun. I guess if that’s what gives you a boner, Michael Bay.

Anyway they ride motorcycles and go to strip clubs, trying to live the HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN lifestyle, and oh my goodness, old man science is really gonna have to loosen up that starched collar and take off that pocket protector if he’s gonna rock ‘n roll with these outrageous party animals. For example “NASA” shows them their “space vehicle” The Armadillo and they’re like look pal, real Americans don’t need all this smarty pants space machine crap, and they yank out the equipment they aren’t familiar with and throw it on the ground and plan to make a few changes to the thing. NASA probly spent years and millions of our tax dollars researching and designing and building that stuff but since some oil drillers didn’t know what it did FUCK YOU EGGHEAD, IT GOES IN THE TRASH. I’m gonna put a skull handle on the gearshift though. HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES? IT’S A SKULL. THAT’S MY THING. GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT, I WALK.

I don’t like this part of the movie, but I get it. In the tradition of the ol’ “Just How Badass Is He?” speech Thornton gets to do a “Just How Good At Drilling Is He?” voiceover. These guys are the best in the world, blah blah blah. I tend to enjoy that type of shit. And there are some training montages and they have their last night out and etc.

Bay talks up his NASA consultants, but admits that rather than try for an accurate depiction of the agency he wanted to show “what my perception of NASA would be,” which mostly means that he went to their real offices and didn’t think they looked cool enough. “I was VERY unimpressed when I went to NASA. Just in terms of the look and the lack of design. Um, but I was also very impressed with, just, the intelligent people that I met there and the systems that they’re doing.”

For the movie he gave them a cooler building, and an office that has weird spikes on the wall (?), making sure it doesn’t look like the real place, which he claims more than once on the commentary smells like your grandma’s old TV (I can’t relate to this, seems like a pretty specific memory).

“What I tried to do with NASA is sexy it up… the astronauts we saw, they’re not studly, they’re little guys, you know, they’re not the guys you saw in the movie THE RIGHT STUFF. Astronauts are… they’re scientists.”

So now that the Everyday Guys are teamed up with Sexy NASA, I guess we got ourselves a movie, right? The trouble is that they have this mission to go on this asteroid, and then they go on the mission, and you realize “oh shit, this really is gonna be about them being on the asteroid now, isn’t it?” And from that point on it’s mostly irrelevant that they’re “rough and tumble” or “everyday guys.” Now they’re just astronauts who look and behave the same as the professional astronauts, except for the occasional Steve Buscemi wisecrack or whatever.

To me, anyway, it’s really boring, these adventures on this soundstage set of a spiky planet. They have to drill a hole, and get to a certain depth. Strap yourself in, this is gonna be the main section of the movie. The most exciting thing they do on the asteroid is jump the Armadillo over a ravine and compare it to Evel Knievel. That can only take up so much screen time, I’m afraid.

I guess it’s arguably more exciting than the earlier part on the MIR space station, where they meet a cosmonaut (Peter Stormare, THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK) and refuel and then there’s a big explosion. I can’t follow the geography of this action scene even though they literally have a computer readout showing everybody as dots on a map, which Bay admits on the commentary they added as a last resort when the editing was not communicating where they were. I’m honestly impressed that he was conscious of that. Doesn’t always seem to be of concern to him, especially in those days.

Of the many reasons I hated this in 1998, that was the main one. I remember at a certain point in the movie becoming very distracted by the pace of the editing, ignoring the conversation and trying to count how many seconds each shot lasted. It was a while before I noticed one longer than two seconds. That was only the second time I’d noticed fast edits and haphazard camera placements making a movie difficult for me to watch, so it was a new phenomenon. The first one was CON AIR, which shares a producer and two editors.

In 2018, ARMAGEDDON still feels pretty chaotic. There are sequences where everybody’s wearing the same astronaut outfits and vibrating, so I can’t make out their faces. There are a bunch of astronauts who are barely if ever introduced and I can’t keep track of them. There are a couple odd things like closeups of Thornton having a brace on one foot when he mentions it, but I never saw it in a wide shot. But, as I suspected, all this is tame compared to some of Bay’s TRANSFORMERSes, the Neveldine/Taylor movies and some of the post-BOURNE shakycam action, so honestly it didn’t bother me much this time. I guess my brain has adjusted to this type of shit.

So the bigger problem now is that – how can I put this? – I don’t like Bay’s attitude. Any time you hear rock ‘n roll guitars on the soundtrack it means someone is about to do a “funny” rebellious thing, so Harry is introduced on his oil rig hitting golf balls at a Greenpeace boat. Bay claims that “the only reason” he’s attacking Greenpeace is for being hypocrites because their boat needs gas to run, and Harry claims to donate to them, but I don’t see any way to interpret this that doesn’t include fuck you you hippie dweebs the environment is for pussies.

Then Harry catches his adult daughter (Liv Tyler, THE INCREDIBLE HULK) in bed with his employee A.J. (Ben Affleck, PAYCHECK) – as is her right – so he chases him around the rig firing shots at him. The ol’ “get away from my daughter’s vagina, it is my most sacred possession” routine, always good for a laugh. There are jokes about Rockhound (Buscemi) enjoying underage girls, and maybe this is a petty thing to complain about, but it annoys me how delighted they are with their plan of demanding to not have to pay taxes anymore. No, I’m not gonna ask for a million dollars – I’d rather have less if it means not having to do my part to pay for infrastructure and social services. On the commentary track, of course, Bay proudly takes credit for the line, because “what better way to screw with the government than to never pay taxes again?”

Take that, the government who prevented the extinction of all life on Earth (SPOILER). We didn’t need your dumb space shuttles. We could’ve just stayed here and pointed our drills upwards and drilled it when it hit.

Of course, Bay seems less passionate about stickin it to the Man than stickin it to women, or at least the wife of the amateur astronomer who discovers the asteroid who storms into his telescope wearing a bathrobe over a nightgown and growls “Your Stouffer’s pot pie’s been on the table almost ten hours. I want a divorce!” The “Stouffer’s” detail is the kicker for this scene. Clearly we’re supposed to scoff that it’s only a frozen meal. A good wife would’ve prepared a pot pie from scratch for him to waste! So the crowd goes wild when he yells “GO GET MY GOD DAMN PHONE BOOK! GET THE BOOK! GET THE BOOK! GET THE BOOK!” If it was now they’d start chanting “Lock her up!” And even moreso in the later scene where he asks if he can name the asteroid “Dottie, after my wife.” She looks very surprised. Touched. Then he adds, “She’s a vicious life suckin bitch from which there’s no escape.”

Am I right, fellas? Ha ha. Wives are the worst. Always ruining our lives trying to be ghostbusters and have access to health care and taking too many short cuts in the preparation of food.

Like INDEPENDENCE DAY or other disaster movies, Bay has the occasional montages of people in different parts of the world looking up at the sky or spending their possible last moments with their family or watching the live coverage or whatever. He uses real people and locations and gives it the majestic look of some heart-string-pulling commercial for AT&T or something that would play during the Super Bowl. On the commentary, Bay refers to some of them as “these Americana bits” – timeless, picturesque farmland stuff with little boys running in slow motion playing with toy Space Shuttles. This is it, the real world, the real people, living their real lives. We are all around the country, all around the globe, but we are all the same, united in our fate. We are together. We are one.

Except for some reason the parts in Shanghai are filmed on an enormous, stylized set on a soundstage and it looks like PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN or some shit

For a movie about an international team fighting stateless space debris, it’s surprising how much Bay can make it feel like flag-waving propaganda. Willis and others are occasionally framed in front of American flags, which also wave in glorious slow motion in some of those “bits.” The two shuttles on the mission are named “Freedom” and “Independence.” In the opening space disaster there’s a closeup of debris hitting and destroying the flag patch on an astronaut’s shoulder, like a not-very-subtle director might do with a bullet hit in a war scene.

OUR WAY OF LIFE IS UNDER ATTACK!!! BY SPACE ROCKS!

He knows people get a boner from this stuff and thinks it’s okay to throw it in there devoid of any meaning.

“It was a movie that really hit the chord of America, it was very patriotic,” Bay explains. “We made it that way because, as my grandfather always told me, you can make money if you sell stuff to middle America, and that’s what this movie– this movie really hit the heartland of America. And you know, it’s kind of odd when you make a PG-13 movie. You’ve got to actually kind of dumb it up, you’ve gotta kind of, you gotta make it for that 13 year old and, but you’ve gotta make it interesting enough for an adult.”

Failing to walk that delicate line are an elite team of deep core screenwriters, “the best money can buy” according to producer Jerry Bruckheimer. It’s always been easy to joke about it taking, according to the credits, five writers to concoct a movie of this, uh, quality level. Most of them have done stuff I like, too. The idea reportedly came from rough and tumble Jonathan Hensleigh (DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, THE PUNISHER, KILL THE IRISHMAN), but I also read that the first draft was by the everyday Robert Roy Pool (OUTBREAK). There’s also J.J. Abrams (JOY RIDE, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3,SUPER 8, THE FORCE AWAKENS), who at that time was starting to do TV shows I believe but I don’t know much about it. And there’s Tony Gilroy (the BOURNE movies, MICHAEL CLAYTON, THE GREAT WALL, ROGUE ONE). My guess for the “very young writer” is Shane Salerno (SHAFT, SAVAGES, the upcoming AVATAR sequels, though he also wrote ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM). Uncredited writers who worked on it were Paul Attanasio (QUIZ SHOW, DONNIE BRASCO, creator of Homicide: Life on the Streets), Ann Biderman (COPYCAT, PUBLIC ENEMIES, creator of Ray Donovan), Scott Rosenberg (CON AIR, GONE IN 60 SECONDS, KANGAROO JACK, PAIN & GAIN) and might as well throw in Robert Towne (CHINATOWN, TEQUILA SUNRISE, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE).

As crazy as that is, I’ve always thought the real joke was how many acclaimed or award winning screenwriters were in the cast itself. Thornton had won the Oscar and WGA awards for best adapted screenplay with SLING BLADE in 1997. Affleck had just won the Oscar and Golden Globe for best original screenplay with GOOD WILL HUNTING. Owen Wilson had written BOTTLE ROCKET and had RUSHMORE coming soon. Buscemi had written and directed TREES LOUNGE.

Just as Summer of ’98’s first space debris ensemble movie DEEP IMPACT used Jon Favreau’s SWINGERS heat to add indie respectability to the cast, ARMAGEDDON had Wilson at a point when Bay could call him “a great new up and coming kid who I found in BOTTLE ROCKET.” His only previous Hollywood movie was ANACONDA. As mentioned, Thornton and Affleck were a few movies into cashing in on major indie success; likewise Stormare was only two years into his FARGO career breakthrough.

That’s a cooler cast than GODZILLA or LOST IN SPACE, that’s for sure. But I bet it trailed behind them in the selling-crap department. The Armadillo has guns on it. Bay says they cut the scene that gave an explanation for it, but that the real reason is that toy companies told him guns sell well. There was a Revell model of “Space Shuttle with Armadillo Drilling Unit” and a “Russian Space Center.” Hot Wheels also made an Armadillo and a “Shuttle Launch Microscape” as well as big ass action figures of Harry and A.J. in their space suits. And they come with drills for heroic drilling in your backyard.

There were also… cups or something at McDonalds.

When Disneyland Paris opened in 2002, it memorialized ARMAGEDDON’s space station explosion scene with a how-special-effects-are-done attraction:

But it will soon be closed to make room for Marvel Comics rides, so now the movie’s most lasting marks is giving us the god damn Oscar nominated “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” Aerosmith love song to get stuck in our heads for an unfortunate number of days after watching the movie. According to Bruckheimer, the song came about because Bay read in the newspaper that GODZILLA had a soundtrack album, and he said “How come we don’t have a soundtrack?” And he heard a Diane Warren song and knew that Tyler’s dad was in Aerosmith, so luckily

Doing what?

she had another job in the movie besides sitting alone in a dark NASA office worrying. There’s two Aerosmiths mixed in there with ZZ Top, Bob Seger and Jon Bon Jovi. Whoever said Nirvana killed the old long haired style of rock n roll obviously never mentioned it to Armageddon: The Album.

Meanwhile, the score by Trevor Rabin (THE GLIMMER MAN, REMEMBER THE TITANS) alternates between trying to make you put your hand over your heart and sounding like TITANIC, and I don’t think the latter is an accident. Multiple people on the commentary mention bulking up the love story in response to the success of that movie.

Long before fellow Summer ’98 releases FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, INSOMNIA and THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, ARMAGEDDON was enshrined in a special edition DVD release from the prestigious Criterion label, a controversial choice that inspired rumors and head scratching. The edition (never ported to Blu-Ray) includes a director’s cut, a laudatory essay by Bay’s Wesleyan film professor Jeanine Basinger, and the commentary track I’ve been quoting so much in this review. The track (edited together from separate interviews) is legendary for how much Affleck makes fun of the movie’s logic, but he doesn’t necessarily come out looking great. It pointedly cuts from Affleck mocking the goofiness of “stunt acting” to Willis solemnly noting that his stunt double almost died when a pipe hit him in the head.

Affleck does have some funny comments, but I hadn’t heard as much hype about what a weirdo Bay is. He brags that he thought Affleck had “baby teeth” and that he made him wear fake teeth to look more heroic.

Thanks to that illusion of manly incisors, ARMAGEDDON was the #1 worldwide moneymaker of the year (behind SAVING PRIVATE RYAN in the U.S.). And other than the Spielberg one it might be the Summer of ’98 movie people still bring up the most two decades later, even if it’s to complain or argue. It definitely caught on more than its nemesis DEEP IMPACT, even if that one seems to play more often on basic cable. Man, I really don’t like this movie, but unlike the dinosaurs it seems to be here to stay.

(please read this review in Charlton Heston voice)

Summer of ’98 connections: They put in a scene right at the beginning where Eddie Griffin’s dog attacks a toy Godzilla. Willis and Stormare already had MERCURY RISING playing in theaters. THE X-FILES also starts with a prologue where something bad happens millions of years ago that is about to come back in the present day. According to Bruckheimer, they originally had the asteroid discovered by kids. He didn’t find it believable, so he had it changed to the wacky woman hater character with the telescope. He doesn’t mention that that also would’ve been the same as what happened in DEEP IMPACT.

Unfortunate dating: They show one of the World Trade Center towers on fire.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/24/armageddon-2/feed/45Sorry To Bother Youhttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/23/sorry-to-bother-you/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/23/sorry-to-bother-you/#commentsMon, 23 Jul 2018 14:27:19 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32197SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is an absurd, inventive new comedy that’s so playful and funny that its acidic satire of soul-crushing capitalism comes across a little more like an inspirational rallying cry than blind fury at a seemingly insurmountable wall of corporate greed and dehumanization. Though it’s that too. If I was required by law […]

]]>SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is an absurd, inventive new comedy that’s so playful and funny that its acidic satire of soul-crushing capitalism comes across a little more like an inspirational rallying cry than blind fury at a seemingly insurmountable wall of corporate greed and dehumanization. Though it’s that too.

If I was required by law to describe it in terms of movies that already exist, I’d say “low-wage OFFICE SPACE by way of Michel Gondry.” But fuck the law, because it feels like something very new, distinctive and of the moment, from the cast headed by Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson to the soundtrack to even the cool fonts and logos by children’s book illustrator J. Otto Seibold. Stanfield plays Cassius Green (yes, it’s a pun), who lives in his uncle (Terry Crews, STREET KINGS)’s garage until he finds his calling (oh shit, another pun) at a new telemarketing job. I mean, the place is a hellhole on the verge of a strike led by Squeeze (Steven Yeun, formerly of The Walking Dead), but he turns out to be really good at it after co-worker Langston (Danny Glover, PREDATOR 2) teaches him the secret of the “white voice.” It’s not mere code-switching, but a near supernatural channeling of a voice with no worries that he manifests by being dubbed by David Cross (ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS). It’s a broad and hacky joke made almost profound by its layers of subtext and power to creep out his friends and loved ones.

First-time writer-director Boots Riley (did you ask “the leader of the incendiary ’90s hip hop band The Coup?” Because yes, same Boots Riley) mines the exact type of absurdist satire that I crave: exaggerating current societal bullshit into dystopian horrors that feel like something from a weird dream but with a deeply unsettling feeling of truth, of oh jesus, they really would do something like that, wouldn’t they? For example here we have the WorryFree Corporation, who successfully market their iPhone-factory-meets-Heaven’s-Gate life-time contract jobs as a progressive new lifestyle choice. If you can’t see some tech company billionaire doing this and being hailed a genius for it then you’re more optimistic than me.

Like in the real world, the struggle is brightened by good people, particularly Cassius’s militant yet fun as hell girlfriend Detroit (Thompson, CREED), who I will describe as a raised fist with a mischievous smile. She seems like a lady who could show up at Pee-wee’s playhouse and recruit the whole gang for a protest, though most of the cheeky slogans on her t-shirts and earrings would have to be pixelated for Saturday morning television. Her avant-garde performance art involves condoms full of sheep’s blood but also references BERRY GORDY’S THE LAST DRAGON, and she’s part of an infamous protest art movement named after Left Eye from TLC. I like her.

So it’s got an odd brand of quirk, plus touches of magic realism and a lack of adherence to boring literalism that help that good old THEY LIVE style “it figures it would be somethin like this” poetic accuracy ground the story’s more surreal turns.

I should lay off trying to predict the future, but it seems to me people will look back on this period and see a thriving movement of black creativity that includes this movie, GET OUT, Atlanta, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video, Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer album and videos, Kendrick Lamar, Ryan Coogler, maybe Ava Duvernay and Barry Jenkins and some others. These works have so many overlapping themes and collaborators and it’s interesting that this and Coogler and the upcoming BLINDSPOTTING (haven’t seen it yet, but everybody says it’s great) all come out of Oakland. I guess when you grow up near the Wakandan science initiative (or Digital Underground) you can do great things.

I would like to register myself as an early adopter of Lakeith Stanfield. When he stole the first episode of Atlanta and I realized he was the same guy who played Snoop in STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON and Junior in MILES AHEAD I knew he would be doing great things. And this is one of them. Also, can people give Armie Hammer some fucking credit now? I never read that thinkpiece about how he was the embodiment of white privilege or whatever, but I love that it was immediately followed by his slam dunk (but not awards nominated) performance in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and now this crazed villain, a proper use of both his acting talent and his status as a recognizable name to help an indie movie get some financing. It’s not his fault we were too stupid to see THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., so leave the man alone. And hi-ho, Silver.

It’s still weird to me that Riley (like Jordan Peele before him) has suddenly transformed into an acclaimed filmmaker. I bought some Coup albums and saw them live a couple times early in the millennium. I had no idea Riley had written this script which inspired an album of the same name in 2012 and was published by McSweeney’s in 2014, so I can’t claim to be more than a dabbler. But The Coup could get pretty funky and their rebellious stance spoke to me in the Bush era. They gained some pop culture infamy after 9-11 because they were coincidentally about to release an album cover that had them blowing up the World Trade Center. They changed it to a visual pun about a molotov cocktail. I was attracted to song titles like “Genocide & Juice” even if I wasn’t about to (like Riley) call myself a communist.

Instead of growing out of them or having them fade over a long music career, Riley has crystallized his passions and they’ve been reincarnated more powerfully in this medium. The old pinko found a more powerful way to talk about labor rights through popular art. But this is more complex than the downtrodden worker vs. the heartless corporations. Cassius is us. He’s cool and aware and well meaning, but also would like to not live in the garage his whole life. Selling might not be fulfilling to him, but succeeding is. So yes, he loves and supports Detroit, he agrees with Squeeze’s worker’s revolt, but fuck man, he just got his shot to have money for the first time in his life, it’s not easy to give that up. I find myself very sympathetic to him in his temptation to sell out.

I love the irony that he talks his uncle out of signing up for WorryFree because he doesn’t want to see him exploited, but when he gets a promotion to Power Caller he has to rationalize having WorryFree as a top client, spreading their exploitation to others.

It’s true. These things can be hard to stand up against. There are so many little tentacles reaching into so many spots, and surviving is complicated. For example, there’s this giant Seattle corporation that I’m mad at for shutting down a tax that would’ve helped fight the homelessness crisis that I feel their presence here has exacerbated. But I don’t know if I can extricate myself from their ads that help me stay afloat or their services that sell and even publish my books. I don’t even get a fancy apartment out of it but if I’m supposed to be doing something about them I don’t know how to do it yet. Sorry, Detroit.

***EXTREME SPOILER SECTION***

Seriously, don’t read this before the movie. I was happy I didn’t hear about any of this shit before seeing the movie, but I want to discuss it with people who have seen it.

Is it just me or is it weird that within a year Steven Yeun is in two excellent, biting satires where he’s involved in a militant movement against a corporation that’s involved in weird genetically modified animals? (The other one is OKJA.) I guess that’s just his niche. I wonder if he’s worried about getting typecast.

Jesus, equisapiens, huh? How ’bout them equisapiens. This is a crazy plot twist that honestly would’ve seemed twice as crazy two years ago but these days, shit, who knows what you’re gonna read about tomorrow. If the Trumps believed in science they’d be making all kinds of crazy animal hybrids with giant dicks.

You gotta go that far for it even to seem like satire these days. But it works because it’s true. Yes, if they could make more money by having mutant slaves, they would be okay with it. And everybody would shrug it off.

There’s that well-worn trope from A FACE IN THE CROWD, where the villain rants about his true beliefs or his evil plan and the heroes record it or broadcast it and the exposure saves the day. See also UHF, BATMAN RETURNS, DIRTY WORK, 16 BLOCKS, etc. For years I wanted to see one where they record the evil politician saying something incriminating, they play it, and nobody cares. Instead of a movie they did it with Trump’s famous grab ’em by the pussy video. So the cliche may be dead.

I love how they do it here: he’s only able to get a platform by being humiliated in an accidental viral video. Then he has to go on a popular show where they badly beat his face in and completely cover him in actual shit. Only then can he broadcast the devastating video that lets the cat out of the bag about this outrageous abomination against God and Man, and… well, it doesn’t stop jack shit and in fact it helps the company’s stock prices go through the roof. The media helpfully characterizes the shocking existence of human-animal-hybrid-slaves as a technological breakthrough.

I really believe right now they would get away with it. We’re fucked, people. But at least we have SORRY TO BOTHER YOU.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/23/sorry-to-bother-you/feed/21Skyscraperhttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/19/skyscraper/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/19/skyscraper/#commentsThu, 19 Jul 2018 20:46:52 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32174We had DIE HARD on a boat and DIE HARD in a bus and DIE HARD on a train and DIE HARD in a hockey stadium and a couple DIE HARDs in malls and DIE HARD on piano and DIE HARD still in a building but not as good with Anna Nicole Smith (called SKYSCRAPER) […]

]]>We had DIE HARD on a boat and DIE HARD in a bus and DIE HARD on a train and DIE HARD in a hockey stadium and a coupleDIE HARDs in malls and DIE HARD on piano and DIE HARD still in a building but not as good with Anna Nicole Smith (called SKYSCRAPER) and now we have DIE HARD still in a building but not as good without Anna Nicole Smith (but still called SKYSCRAPER). Dwayne Therock-Johnson plays Will Sawyer, former FBI agent turned small time security consultant given the huge break of overseeing the opening of the residential upper half of a fictional 225 story world’s tallest building in Hong Kong.

“The Pearl” as it’s called due to a round structure at the top is owned by rich dude Zhao (Chin Han, THE DARK KNIGHT, GHOST IN THE SHELL), who we later find out is being shaken down by some tactical mastermind guy (Roland Moller, ATOMIC BLONDE) whose guerrillas infiltrate and set the building on fire. Will is outside of the building when it happens, but he gets blamed for it and must evade the police THE FUGITIVE style and figure out how the hell to get onto the building because his wife (Neve Campbell, WILD THINGS!) and twins (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) are on the 96th floor.

It’s a Chinese co-production emulating DIE HARD, but it has none of the propulsive thrills of real Chinese action movies or the late ’80s/early ’90s ones it looks up to. It’s an aggressively bland and mediocre take on the time honored premise, though not completely devoid of entertainment value. Part of the fun, to the extent that there is any, is the set up, introducing the characters, the preposterous features of the building (double helix turbines?) and several blatant “don’t you worry your pretty little head about this innocent little detail here, there’s nothing noteworthy about it and it’s definitely not going to come back and be important later” moments. My favorite of those is when Zhao gives Will a tour of the “pearl” at the top and its planks of reflecting HD screens that serve no explicable purpose other than a setting for an ENTER THE DRAGON style mirror maze finale.

Another one is the prologue where we see him in an FBI hostage situation. He tries to save a little girl, whose father turns around and reveals he’s wearing a bomb vest, which goes off. This sets up at least three things: he loses a leg and has to use a prosthetic, he gets surgery from his future wife, and at the end he faces basically the same scenario and gets a chance to handle it successfully.

Now, who the fuck am I to tell writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber (DODGEBALL, WE’RE THE MILLERS, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE) how to tell his story, but I believe the good version of this would ditch the opening scene entirely, because

one: opening with him losing his leg suggests it’s the central event of his life, undermining the nice touch that the rest of the movie doesn’t make a big deal out of it

two: why is it necessary that he marry the surgeon, that is just weird

three: how ’bout the thing he has to face is rescuing his god damn family from danger, why does it have to turn out to be about dealing with the trauma that in every other scene he seems to have long since overcome

But I really shouldn’t focus on that because it’s far from the most egregious storytelling weakness. Instead let’s consider the worst one. It can be inferred that Will gets the job because someone wanted him to be in over his head, but it’s still amazing to me how little he does. We’ve been told how amazing this building is, how unprecedented, how much of a target for terrorism it is, how Zhao might never be able to get it insured. But then all they do to make sure it’s ready is call in this one guy, and if he inspects anything it’s off screen during some unspecified but seemingly not very significant passage of time.

He hasn’t even had a discussion with them before – he acts nervous, like it’s a job interview. His friend who got him the job (Pablo Schreiber, DEN OF THIEVES) introduces Will to Zhao and two other guys (including cartoonishly snooty insurance rep Noah Taylor [PREDESTINATION]), then Will gives Zhao some exposition about how the high-tech sprinkler system works in the building (I’m surprised he doesn’t know already), then he basically says “okay, we’re almost done here, I just have to go over to this other building to check this one thing and then you’re good.”

What the fuck is your job, dude? What is your expertise, your process? These would be interesting things to include in the movie. I would think these would be required things to include in the movie, but I guess not. Shouldn’t we see him and a big team power-walking around spitting out jargon, looking at screens, thinking they know what must’ve been overlooked, being impressed that it wasn’t, showing that they really know their shit, they are really thorough, they thought of everything, etc.?

I guess not. No time for that. We gotta get to all the action. Well, “all the” is kind of overstating it. The parts with the action. He climbs outside the building for a bit. It’s okay. The most memorable spectacle moment is the shit with the crane that you saw in the trailer. Despite the great J.J. Perry being second unit director, the occasional fights are not very exciting and not that much more comprehensible than that period after TAKEN came out when most things were so hard to follow I had to make up a ratings system. I do appreciate that Will (SPOILER) stays true to his not using guns anymore and doesn’t have an Al Powell moment at the end where he shoots somebody and you’re supposed to proud of him.

Most of the enjoyment I got was from the stuff I thought was dumb, like at the end when they’re filthy and exhausted and he says “Let’s go home” and nobody says “Wait a minute, are we seriously just flying back to the United States now? Can I at least take a shower?”

And I got a chuckle from how low an opinion the movie SKYSCRAPER has of anybody who would go see the movie SKYSCRAPER. There’s this part where SPOILER his wife gets ahold of the tablet that controls everything in the building and she’s trying to re-activate the fire extinguishing system. And you may realize “oh that’s right, there was that whole scene at the beginning where she needed help with her phone and he really emphasized to her that usually the best thing to do is turn it off and then turn it back on.” And then she remembers this. So she finds a thing that says “REBOOT” and presses it and then watches as all of the lights and everything turn off on the building.

So if you had forgotten that scene, now is when you go “oh, ha ha, like she did with her phone at the beginning.” And she’s nervous because everything stays off for a second and what if she screwed everything up, but phew, the lights start coming on and everything else starts coming on and sure enough that system is activated and finally starts putting out the fire.

And then she explains that she rebooted it. And then she explains that that means she turned it off and back on.

YEAH, WE FUCKING FOLLOW YOU, SKYSCRAPER. IT’S LIKE THE PHONE THING EARLIER. THAT WAS VERY CLEAR LIKE 2 MINUTES AGO. Why do you hate us?

There’s some silly stuff about why the bad guys are after Zhao. But there should definitely be more ridiculousness to make this thing more enjoyable. The most obvious area for that is in the gimmickry of the building. It’s amazing how little they do with that considering that it’s the only reason to make this movie.

Well, that and The Rock. The world loves The Rock and the world loves that The Rock seems like a nice guy, and even though the world realizes The Rock is most entertaining when he’s more of a macho asshole like in FAST FIVE the world is also charmed to see him play America’s Sweetheart like this. And having lost a limb during an act of heroism makes this character even more American and more sweet than standard issue The Rock.

Also, the perfect squareness of Will Sawyer stands in contrast to messy asshole John McClane, which is sort of a necessity for a movie that cannot and will not be viewed by any human being on earth without being compared to DIE HARD. They gotta make him different so, you know, he doesn’t wear a sleeveless undershirt. He does wear shoes. He doesn’t curse (it’s PG-13). He uses an actual rope to hang off the building instead of a fire hose. He doesn’t use hardly any humor or jokes until one decent one-liner. He is happily married with no problems or issues that he is concerned about dealing with while facing his own mortality.

So, yeah, he’s different from John McClane. And much less interesting.

We also got a villain problem here. For a while I wasn’t even clear which one was the main villain they were talking about, he seemed more like a henchman. He does not have a memorable personality, presence, dialogue, motive or gimmick. He doesn’t have any memorable henchmen. I actually have already forgotten what type of henchmen he had. Some gunmen I believe. Professionals maybe. Oh, the lady with the cool hair. I remember her.

Actors I like who don’t get much to do: Byron Mann (BELLY OF THE BEAST) as the Tommy Lee Jones, the police inspector trying to catch Will but also figuring out that he’s the good guy. Matt O’Leary (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD, DEATH SENTENCE, SORORITY ROW, FAT KID RULES THE WORLD, EDEN, THE LONE RANGER) as “Skinny Hacker.” Campbell gets a little bit of a role. I like that a ways in they suddenly mention that she was a combat surgeon in Afghanistan, setting up two parts where she fights somebody. I don’t know. She deserves more to do, but I was still happy to see her again. I guess she’s been in TV, like everybody else, but I haven’t seen her since SCREAM 4 in 2011.

I love The Rock. We love The Rock. But it’s time to face the fact that this Next Action Hero is about 40 movies into his career and doesn’t have anything close to a COMMANDO or a PREDATOR or a TOTAL RECALL let alone a TERMINATOR or a T2 under his belt. Honestly two of his best vehicles are the fuckin prequel to the shitty MUMMY movie and Brett Ratner’s version of HERCULES, and if you add those two together you’re nowhere near a CONAN THE BARBARIAN. His best action work is an ensemble series that he joined at part 5 and might not be doing anymore. This is a problem.

Maybe his tastes will never match his charisma, but jesus fuckin christ man it’s time for him to make some actual great movies to justify all these ones that we only can manage to sit through because he’s in them. He needs to find his James Cameron, his Steven Soderbergh, his Isaac Florentine, his director who makes great movies and knows how to bring out the very best in him, push him to new heights, showcase his strengths. In my opinion that is probly not gonna end up being the guy that directed DODGEBALL or the guy that directed CATS & DOGS: THE REVENGE OF KITTY GALORE. It could definitely be David Leitch (JOHN WICK, ATOMIC BLONDE, DEADPOOL 2), who’s doing HOBBS AND SHAW, or Shane Black if he ever gets that DOC SAVAGE off the ground. But it better be somebody. It’s time for Hollywood to stop wasting our precious, finite geological resources.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/19/skyscraper/feed/95Out of Sighthttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/18/out-of-sight/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/18/out-of-sight/#commentsWed, 18 Jul 2018 17:15:49 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32054June 26, 1998 OUT OF SIGHT pretty much struts onto the screen, David Holmes’ funky organ already jamming on “It’s Your Thing” as the Universal logo spins, George Clooney as Jack Foley storming out of a situation that we’ll only understand later, his frustrations underlined by freeze frames, when he spots a bank across the […]

OUT OF SIGHT pretty much struts onto the screen, David Holmes’ funky organ already jamming on “It’s Your Thing” as the Universal logo spins, George Clooney as Jack Foley storming out of a situation that we’ll only understand later, his frustrations underlined by freeze frames, when he spots a bank across the street. And he goes over unarmed, alone, winging it, and robs the place.

Clooney had already become a superstar on ER and proven himself big-screen-worthy in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, but it was Steven Soderbergh who taught him to cut down on his trademark head-bobbing and become a real movie star. Wearing a suit I thought I heard somewhere was inspired by Cary Grant’s from NORTH BY NORTHWEST, he manages to charm his poor bank teller victim enough that when he tells her to have a nice day as he’s leaving with the money she reflexively says “You too.”

It’s a small, funny moment, but it’s also important. We have to believe this guy is so damn charismatic that the federal marshal who witnesses him digging out of Lompoc and gets thrown in the trunk of a car with him will fall for him. And Clooney pulls it off.

The marshal is Karen Sisco, played by Jennifer Lopez (ANACONDA), who is more often discussed in terms of stardom than of work – she’s been a backup dancer, a pop star and a reality show judge, after all – but here she’s one hell of an actress. She fully embodies every aspect of the Karen Sisco character: the fashionable, womanly agent who’s always ready to pull a shotgun out of the trunk or smack a guy around with a telescoping baton; the smack-talking, Nicorette-gum-chewing tough girl who’s unwilling to put up with your shit; the daddy’s girl who says “Oh my God, it’s beautiful” when he gives her a handgun as a gift and hangs around his house on the weekends wearing baggy sweat shorts and a Dolphins jersey; the woman who’s smart enough to know better but can’t help being smitten with Jack.

We see most of these in that classic meet-cute scene in the trunk of Jack’s partner Buddy (Ving Rhames, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS)’s car. Karen has some smart ass answers, she makes a play for her gun and fires on him, but also they get into discussing movies and she finds herself reminding him the names of the stars and smiling at his dumb misquotes. There’s a perfect moment when he mentions THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR and you see her contemplating something for a second and then deciding yes, she will tell him something that always bothered her about the movie, that “I never thought it made sense, though, the way they got together so quick.”

Sure, it’s a meta commentary on the type of story we’re witnessing, but it’s also the sort of thing you might bring up in a conversation, a normal one with someone who has not abducted you. And not only does she indulge in this bit of casual chit-chat with her captor, she turns to look over her shoulder at him when she does! This is not reluctantly giving in to a charade that they’re discussing movies. This is deciding that yes, she wants to discuss movies with this guy. Later her boss Daniel (Wendell B. Harris Jr., director/star of CHAMELEON STREET) will rightly note this detail of her report with suspicion.

Most of the characters in this are a little bit dumb and a little bit smart, and there’s a hierarchy to it. Karen is only dumb if you hold her relationship decisions against her, and she’s definitely smarter than Jack. He’s “robbed more banks than anyone else in the computer,” but he’s also the dumbass who robbed a bank on a whim and then flooded his engine trying to drive away. He says himself “You can’t do three falls and say you have much of a brain.” And in that scene in the trunk he’s immediately outclassed by Karen, not just in movie trivia. He’s slower than her. When she mentions Clyde Barrow it takes him a minute to realize that’s as in Bonnie and Clyde. When he finds her mace she says “That’s for your breath. You could use it. Squirt some in your mouth,” and instead of just getting that she’s joking and insulting him he says, “Yeah, well that’s mace, isn’t it?”

That’s in the trunk. In prison Jack’s the smartest one around. He outsmarts Maurice “Snoopy” Miller (Don Cheadle, also in BULWORTH that summer), pointing out the flaws of his shakedown to defenseless Wall Street scammer Ripley (Albert Brooks, also a voice in DR. DOLITTLE that summer). He outsmarts Chino (Luis Guzman, also in SNAKE EYES that summer) and Lulu (Paul Soileau) by figuring out their escape plan and getting in on it, and the prison guard by telling him about the plan and then hitting him over the head and stealing his uniform.

Arguably the dumbest of all of them is Glenn (Steve Zahn, also in SAFE MEN that summer), the pothead who told them about Ripley’s diamonds but finds himself spending most of the movie in terror of either Karen or Snoopy. Zahn plays Glenn as a lovable idiot who never takes off his sunglasses and seemingly exists only to get dunked on by everybody (Jack, Karen, Snoopy). This makes it devastating when Snoopy and his psycho brother-in-law Kenneth (Isaiah Washington, another actor who was also in BULWORTH that summer) trick him into coming along to kill someone who crossed him. Soderbergh stays close on Glenn’s terrified face as the killing happens, focusing on the end of his innocence rather than the shock of the act itself. He’s never the same after that. His glasses get knocked off during the violence, and we see his haunted eyes for the rest of the movie.

Screenwriter Scott Frank had written DEAD AGAIN, LITTLE MAN TATE, MALICE and HEAVEN’S PRISONERS, but of course his most relevant credit was GET SHORTY. I like that one, but this is much more how I see the Elmore Leonard tone – it’s funny, but it’s not a cartoon, it’s real. This has so many of the things I love about Leonard’s stories and characters, not least of which is the true-to-life importance of dumb accidents and coincidences in how things play out. Like how Karen happens to be questioning Adele (Catherine Keener, also in YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS that summer) at her house when Chino shows up to try to find out from her where Jack is, and gets to arrest him. Or the way White Boy Bob (Keith Loneker, JERSEY BOYS) – a goofball who’s more excited to steal steaks than diamonds – SPOILER suddenly slips and blows his own head off. Or of course that great moment when Karen spots Jack escaping in the hotel elevator from across the lobby and freezes up rather than calling it in and he stands there like a deer in headlights and then gives a little wave, not really thinking about it, just like when that bank teller told him to have a nice day.

This is a story about cops and robbers, but it’s mostly about that attraction, that crush. Karen’s dad Marshall (Dennis Farina, also in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN that summer), a retired cop, clearly notices the signs. He knows she makes bad decisions in her love life, and lets his opinions be known through implication and wry jabs, but doesn’t judge her or tell her what to do. For example he clearly disapproves of her seeing Ray Nicolette – an FBI agent, but married – so he lets him come over, but punishes him through uncomfortable conversation.

For Jack the person who recognizes and worries but doesn’t interfere is Buddy. Buddy notes the ridiculousness of Jack hanging around Florida to see his former hostage again, but knows it’s no use to tell him no.

The movie doesn’t pretend this is a smart idea. On Karen’s part there’s an animal attraction – we know because the first direct acknowledgment of her interest in Jack is a dream where she goes to apprehend him, finds him taking a bath, and rather than arrest him climbs in with him. There’s even a shot of her eyes moving down to check him out before stepping into the room.

In a way the whole relationship is like that dream – it makes no logical sense for their lives, it cannot last, but they want to enjoy it. Most of us can’t relate to being cops or robbers falling in love with each other, but the very identifiable life experience at the heart of this story is the great thing that cannot last. The snowman, the sand castle, the vacation. In a movie made up of great scenes the greatest may be the one where they finally meet up in the hotel bar on a beautiful, snowy night. It’s so loaded with romantic tension that it’s easy to miss the virtuoso chops of editor Anne V. Coates (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, RAW DEAL) effortlessly flitting back and forth across time, between the bar and the hotel room. Sure, Jack is an escaped fugitive, but he’s clearly a better choice for a one night stand than either of the traveling ad men who sportingly take turns trying to talk to her. These are pitch perfect, almost-a-documentary sleazy business bros without having to resort to them actually being jerks or crossing the line from annoying to doing something wrong.

She brushes them off with attitude, saying she wants to be alone, but surely thinking of Jack, who suddenly appears as if it was another dream and they play out that fantasy he talked about in the trunk about what would happen if they met under different circumstances. At one point she worries about the reality of it, the fleetingness of it, and he convinces her not to waste the moment thinking about it ending. Worry about that later when there’s “no more time outs,” when I’m robbing a house and you’re doing your job.

I was highly anticipating OUT OF SIGHT before it came out. I had a good feeling about a cool indie director doing an Elmore Leonard movie starring Clooney. I’d seen SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, KAFKA and KING OF THE HILL and it’s not like Soderbergh was my favorite director, but I liked all those movies, and he had this material.

I think I read the book after the movie, but I must’ve flipped through it or something because I knew that the character Ray Nicolette was in it. Since he had just been played by Michael Keaton in JACKIE BROWN, released sixth months prior, I was very curious – would they cut the character out? Change the name? Or who would they get? Sure enough his name is mentioned 11 minutes in and he’s finally seen 41 minutes in and he’s outside of Marshall’s house walking up and I remember thinking “That is him, isn’t it? That’s Michael Keaton!” It was a great surprise made possible by Quentin Tarantino pulling some strings to get Miramax to allow the use of the character without charge.

Wouldn’t you know it, OUT OF SIGHT only opened in fourth place, below DOCTOR DOLITTLE, MULAN and THE X-FILES, the latter two in their second weeks. It eventually made $77.7 million worldwide, which is $3 million more than JACKIE BROWN, and more than its budget, but not the double that is often said to be needed to be profitable. Though not the smash hit you’d want for an obvious instant classic like this to be, it did get two well deserved Oscar nominations (adapted screenplay and editing – it lost to GODS AND MONSTERS and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), and I think it’s fair to say OUT OF SIGHT ended up being an important movie for many of the people involved.

For Clooney it was a great start to a post-BATMAN AND ROBIN search for higher artistic standards. He followed it with movies directed by Terence Malick, David O. Russell and the Coen Brothers. I have to wonder what would’ve happened if Lopez had used the momentum of this performance for a similar push. Instead she chose to focus on music, releasing her first album On the 6 in 1999, and didn’t return to the screen until THE CELL in 2000. So it didn’t really end up being a career breakthrough for Lopez, but it’s the one you can always point to when people who know her as a nicknamed pop star diminish her as an actress.

It’s also worth noting that this is the first major role for future Oscar winner Viola Davis other than the Joe Dante TV movie THE PENTAGON WARS. Her bitter intensity is on full display as Snoopy’s sister Moselle. Soderbergh later had her in TRAFFIC and SOLARIS.

Holmes was an Irish electronic musician who had taken influence from movie scores – his 1995 debut album was called This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash the Seats. IMDb lists a 1997 TV movie called SUPPLY & DEMAND and a 1998 film called RESURRECTION MAN as his previous scores. He was apparently brought in by producer Danny DeVito to make a theme song, but his role kept expanding. It was such a late decision that the movie poster (at least the one I have hanging above my computer) incorrectly credits Cliff Martinez, who had scored all of Soderbergh’s previous films. But it’s hard to picture any version of the movie without Holmes’ music, which blends so seamlessly with a soulful soundtrack including The Isley Brothers, Willie Bobo and a Mongo Santamaria cover of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.”

Nothing against Martinez, but I have trouble imagining he could’ve come up with anything as effective as this funky ass shit right here:

Let alone this one:

Incidentally, it’s hard for me to believe that it’s been twenty years since I bought that soundtrack CD, which blends several songs with Holmes’ score and dialogue excerpts. I still listen to it pretty regularly.

Holmes went on to great scores for Soderbergh’s OCEAN’S movies, HAYWIRE and LOGAN LUCKY, plus Steve McQueen’s HUNGER and also ANALYZE THAT (?). He also did that movie I love, STANDER, with his band The Free Association.

In Frank’s case I’m not sure it was a breakout for his career other than to establish a relationship with Soderbergh, who recently produced Frank’s Netflix western series Godless, and deepen his reputation for literary adaptation. After this he adapted Philip K. Dick in MINORITY REPORT, that book in MARLEY & ME (with fellow Summer of ’98 alumni Don Roos), and Marvel Comics in THE WOLVERINE and LOGAN. He’s also turned out to be a really good director with the original crime tale THE LOOKOUT and the Lawrence Block adaptation A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES. He was also the director for Godless and an unaired pilot I’m dying to see, the Charles Willeford-based Hoke starring Paul Giamatti

But most of all, OUT OF SIGHT was a breakthrough for Soderbergh, who came on after Universal already had Clooney attached. The director dropped the Charlie Kaufman script HUMAN NATURE (later done excellently by Michel Gondry) for this shot at the mainstream. Without that decision we might not have had the director-star team that gave us OCEAN’Ses ELEVEN through THIRTEEN, SOLARIS and THE GOOD GERMAN. I think it also marks the beginning of the Soderbergh we know now, who ably alternates between artfully crafted fun movies (ERIN BROCKOVICH, OCEAN’S trilogy, HAYWIRE, MAGIC MIKE, LOGAN LUCKY) and more experimental or niche-audience ones (THE LIMEY, FULL FRONTAL, BUBBLE, CHE, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE) as he sees fit. It’s not really a “one for them, one for me” situation – I think both are for him, and one recharges the other. I like just about everything he does, but to me OUT OF SIGHT is the perfect one, the ideal I always want him to return to.

Is OUT OF SIGHT the best Elmore Leonard adaptation ever? Only JACKIE BROWN could put that into question. Is it the best movie of 1998, a year that gave us SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, BABE: PIG IN THE CITY and BLADE? I’m not ruling it out, but I don’t know. What I do know for sure is that twenty years ago it became one of my favorite movies, and my love for it has only deepened.

P.S.

In 2003 Karen Sisco got her own acclaimed-but-cancelled-before-they-even-aired-it-all-and-never-released-it-on-DVD 10-episode TV series, just called Karen Sisco, with Frank acting as a consultant. Carla Gugino played Karen, Robert Forster played her dad, Obba Babatunde played Daniel. The intro uses “It’s Your Thing” and animations inspired by the colorful OUT OF SIGHT movie poster, and credits both Leonard’s novel and Frank’s screenplay for creating the characters. The pilot – directed by Michael Dinner (HOT TO TROT), who later did the same for Justified – is based on Leonard’s short story “Karen Makes Out.”

I thought it would be hard to accept another actress as the character, but Gugino was great, and the show did a great job of making her a lovable badass with some vulnerabilities, including poor judgment in her love life.

Gugino was also able to reprise the character on a season 3 episode of Justified. For legal reasons, I believe, they had her be married and have a different last name. But we know who she was. (They had intended to make her a bigger part of the show, but her schedule didn’t work out.)

Jack Foley never returned on screen, but he did star in Leonard’s 2009 novel Road Dogs, which also uses a character from LaBrava and one from Riding the Rap.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/18/out-of-sight/feed/25Buffalo ’66http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/17/buffalo-66/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/17/buffalo-66/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2018 18:44:08 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=31956June 26, 1998 Look, I don’t want to brag, but in 1998 I was twenty years younger than I am now. I had the youth. The vigor. The open-mindedness and enthusiasm for things that seemed new and different. I had less of the anger toward people who get on lawns – if I had had […]

Look, I don’t want to brag, but in 1998 I was twenty years younger than I am now. I had the youth. The vigor. The open-mindedness and enthusiasm for things that seemed new and different. I had less of the anger toward people who get on lawns – if I had had a lawn I would’ve invited the youths to hang out on it and talk about youth stuff like did you know Lauryn Hill is doing a solo album or what is up with these Furbies or have you heard about this new WB show coming out in the fall they’re calling it “Ally McBeal in college” I don’t think I’ll watch it but it’s something I read about.

What I’m trying to do here is establish why it’s a good thing that in 1998 BUFFALO ’66 seemed like a great movie. I mean, I haven’t entirely turned my back on it. It’s still interesting. It has many positive qualities. But I definitely question it more now.

It’s easy to see what was appealing in that moment. Star/director/co-writer/composer Vincent Gallo plays Billy Brown, a just-released convict who looks like he inspired half the dudes who were in American Apparel ads (I mean, look at that striped muscle shirt). With cinematographer Lance Acord (first feature for the music video d.p.) he shoots scuzzy locations that seem like the stale refuse of the ’60s and ’70s: cracked parking lots, a bowling alley, a motel, a tiny house decorated in Buffalo Bills memorabilia. Chic, magazine ad ugly. I’m actually kind of surprised it’s not in black and white, but the muted color palette is one of its most striking features.

The supporting cast is A+ cool: Anjelica Huston (CAPTAIN EO) as his mom, Ben Gazzara (ROAD HOUSE) as his dad, Rosanna Arquette (SILVERADO) in one scene as a girl he used to know. Mickey Rourke is in one scene as a bookie, and it’s not one of his great performances, but give Gallo credit for wanting him in the movie before his career resurgence (though after DOUBLE TEAM). Jan-Michael Vincent (THE MECHANIC) has a scene as the manager of the bowling alley, and I found it pretty moving to see him as the old friend who has clearly been through the wringer. Kevin Corrigan (UNSTOPPABLE, HENRY FOOL) has a more substantial role as a weird old friend who timidly tries to finally stand up to Billy, who treats him like shit and ignores his demands to be called “Rocky” instead of “Goon.” Most of his scenes are in his underwear on a bed surrounded by guinea pig cages. He was apparently uncomfortable with the role, and asked to be uncredited. (He’s good, though.)

The music (which is by Gallo) is cool. Even the typography is cool. The end credits don’t scroll, they’re black type on white cards. The filmatism is mostly raw and simple, then he throws in a couple film student show-off experiments: flashbacks that appear in little picture-in-picture screens, a climax that uses an analog version of a pre-BLADE, pre-MATRIX (but post LOST IN SPACE) bullet time type technique. (It’s two different shots; one I think is just live action with the actor standing still with a bloodspray sculpture attached to his head. The other one I have no idea how they did it.)

I guess the big difference between 1998 Vern and 2018 Vern is my level of patience and interest for watching a charmless dirtbag whining, berating a defenselesss teen and (worst of all) feeling sorry for himself. Technically it’s about an ex-con kidnapping a young girl and then planning to assassinate an ex-NFL star. But it’s not a crime movie, it’s a character piece – TAXI DRIVER for people who don’t drive taxis. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just saying this time around I’m less sure about the importance of wallowing in the mundane existence of this specific character.

I always thought it was a funny idea that this is all kicked off by him having to piss real bad. He gets out of the joint and then has to pee and tries to get the guard to let him back in. Still funny. He goes around failing to find a public restroom until he barges into a tap dancing class, where he argues with and then abducts Layla (recent child star Christina Ricci in her third grown up movie of the summer [see FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and THE OPPOSITE OF SEX]). He makes her drive him in her car and also come with him to his parents’ house to pretend to be his wife. She plays along, even pretends to adore him, never to his satisfaction.

The interaction with his parents is full of weirdness. Mom seems to suffer from mild dementia and severe football fever. Dad seems angry and pervy. Both smother Layla with love and praise (dad is always looking for a hug or kiss), but they can barely muster a conversation with their son.

Not that I feel that sorry for him. He bitches and complains even when there’s no reason to. He makes no attempt to improve the situation other than to lie in a transparent attempt to impress them. There are plenty of people who have shittier parents than this who still have the ability to be pleasant to be around.

One bizarre tangent involves dad claiming to be a singer. Layla gets him to perform for her – he plays a supposedly instrumental record of Sinatra songs, clears his throat, then lip syncs. Since the voice is credited as Vincent Gallo Sr. I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s supposed to really be singing, but while watching it I thought he was supposed to be pathetically trying to trick her into thinking he was, with her playing along to be nice. I suppose either way it has the desired oddness.

An aspect that I remember bothering me back then is the way they shoot the long scene of the four of them sitting at a square table. There are straight on shots from different sides, with whichever actor would be in the foreground missing. It’s not in the right place to be a POV shot and you would see their arms on the table if they were there. So pretty much every edit throughout this sequence caused me to be disoriented, thinking that one character had left the room. I remember complaining about it at the time and being told no, it’s intentional, it’s experimental, it’s a tribute to Ozu, and I do think those things are true, but it still doesn’t work for me.

Also back then, though, I somehow didn’t recognize Huston and thought she was some first time actor like maybe his real mom or something. But now I think she does some good stuff here, though there are awkward moments.

I couldn’t remember the plot at all, so I was worried they would never leave that house. Also I kept thinking it was weird that his outfit seemed kind of similar to Jesus Quintana, another ex-con-who-is-attracted-to-children character in another 1998 release that has Ben Gazzara in it. And I had completely forgotten that later he goes bowling and it’s his main (or only) hobby.

The thing I always remember from Gallo’s second film THE BROWN BUNNY that cracks me up is when he’s trying to get a bunny and he has somebody lead him to some cages of bunnies and he asks “Are these the bunnies?” This is such a true and recognizable depiction of a certain type of person who’s exhausting to be around. Yes, these bunnies are the bunnies. Stop saying every word that comes into your brain.

Billy is the same way. He’ll shout across a courtyard to some employee of some business asking where the bathroom is and then narrate his walk to the bathroom and his discovery that it’s closed and then he’ll feel the need to loop back and yell to the person that it’s closed, seeming to blame them. This is the person who always sits behind me at movies and reads signs and t-shirts out loud and describes what’s going on as it happens.

Part of what’s kind of funny but also annoying about the movie is his habit of repeating phrases over and over and over and fucking over again. He feels the need to talk and instruct and explain and criticize the nearest person to him, and this requires alot of saying the same thing multiple times as if they don’t get it when it’s actually him who doesn’t get that they’re just so disgusted with what a fucking piece of shit he is that they would rather glare at him than respond to his endless jibber jabber.

There’s a scene where he makes Layla pose with him in a photo both. He wants her to act like she’s in love with him, which she does (a rare chance for Ricci to come alive in the movie, after mostly being an empty vessel for Billy’s fantasies) while he sits emotionless, and then he keeps telling her she’s doing it wrong. He wants to pretend the photos were taken on different days, so he tells her they need to “span time” and then he keeps saying that phrase the way Seagal keeps saying “you’re a man, right?” and “cupcake” in the bar fight in ON DEADLY GROUND. Okay, we’re going to span time. Okay? Span time. Let’s span time. Spanning time, here we go.

I’m not saying SPOILER I wanted him to really die at the end, but these days it bothers me more that this guy magically gets a happy ending. I know there’s Stockholm syndrome and everything but the idea of Layla having any affection for this abusive slimeball kidnapper is creepy, and it’s treated like an exciting eureka moment when he decides he likes her and finally buys her the hot chocolate she’s been requesting for half the movie. Maybe it’s supposed to be kind of sarcastic, to treat this one small gesture as a turning point and pretend like there’s not a 150% chance he’s still gonna treat her like garbage. Doesn’t play that way to me, though.

Still, that’s my favorite scene, the last one, where Billy visits a donut shop. He’s in a good mood for the only time in the entire movie and he’s buying the hot chocolate and a cookie and trying to joke around with the old timer behind the counter and another one who’s a customer. He’s being a total goofball and trying to connect with an older generation and I imagine it’s similar to how Gallo really behaves sometimes in real life. I’ve experienced countless weirdos like this as a person with many years behind a counter, and this reminds me of the more positive and entertaining ones. Of course, you can get a laugh from a short interaction with somebody like that but not want to then spend the day with them, or a full movie, especially if they’re gonna be a dick the rest of the time.

Back then we didn’t know much about Gallo, but he had a New York art guy mystique. In the early ’80s he was in a noise band called Gray with Jean-Michel Basquiat. And he was in a rap duo called Trouble Deuce. I’ve seen him on the DVD of the legendary old school hip hop pilot Graffiti Rock, calling himself “Prince Vince.” In 1985 he and Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Junior all debuted in the same film, a no budget black and white comedy called THE WAY IT IS. And he was briefly in GOODFELLAS and then ARIZONA DREAM and THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS and THE FUNERAL and TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M., but he definitely wasn’t known as a cinematic troll until he made THE BROWN BUNNY (which I liked) and later offered his sperm for in-vitro fertilization in the merchandise section of his websight (which I thought was funny). And since he’s playing such a loser – even his gun is tiny and pathetic and not cool – I didn’t think of this as that much of a vanity project. He has to have some understanding that this Billy character is terrible and that we’re laughing at him.

But even back then, and moreso now, it’s hard to explain away the scene where he finally does get to pee, and then a guy at the urinal next to him stares at his dick in awe. Billy unleashes homophobic slurs on the guy and he still has to say “But it’s so big!” I mean, I don’t think there’s a possible explanation for putting that in other than the obvious, ridiculous one that he wanted to declare to the world that he had a glorious dick. It’s a very personal story, you see.

Gallo goes out of his way to show Billy having no sexual interest in Layla. You know how it is, ladies throwing themselves at you constantly and you’re like come on, leave me alone. She tries to talk to him, hug him, lay on a bed with him, kiss him, but he keeps rejecting her. When she talks him into letting her get in the bath tub with him not only does no sexual activity seem to take place, but he puts on his undershirt. Such a gentleman kidnapper. He finally does give her a small kiss near the end of the movie, but only after curling up in a fetal position next to her. In another scene he goes into a restroom and cries and mutters “I don’t want to live” to himself. You know, I get this weird feeling we’re supposed to feel sorry for the motherfucker.

Sometimes I do like movies that show the humanity of assholes. It can be less a glorification of shittiness and more an act of unconditional empathy. Reading up on the movie I’ve seen reports of Gallo being mean to people on set but only because he’s playing a mean character. Ricci – who was 17 and making her first low budget movie and (at Gallo’s insistence) her first movie without her mother on set, – says in a Conan O’Brien interview from the time that he yelled at and insulted her but really “he’s a sweetheart.” Courtney Cox said in 2007 that he destroyed their friendship for years by being mean to her while filming GET WELL SOON, but that it turns out he was just being Method and he was great to her on an episode of Dirt.

He seems to be pretty Method in interviews too. Among his IMDb personal quotes you can find him saying that Steven Soderbergh and Wes Anderson “suck,” calling Sofia Coppola “a parasite,” Francis Ford Coppola a “fat pig,” Martin Scorsese “an egomaniac has-been,” Spike Jonze “the biggest fraud out there,” and George W. Bush “a good president.” To the New York Post he called Ricci “an ungrateful c—” and “basically a puppet” and claimed that she was an alcoholic or on cough syrup and that she lost 17 pounds during filming because he “only let her eat one whole pizza pie every day.” In other interviews he disparages Acord as someone who takes credit for the movie but just did what he was told. Complaining about Huston in an interview with Walter Chaw, Gallo said, “And at some point I told her some things like, ‘Listen, baby. We got your name, that’s all I needed, I got my money. I’ll put your wig on a fat truck driver and shoot him from the back.’ And that’s when we had a falling out.”

His bio on IMDb claims that “Misinterpretation of this work is common and Gallo is often incorrectly categorized as a racist, sexist, homophobe” and that “Gallo is one of the most misunderstood, misquoted, misrepresented talents in the past 25 years.”

(I wonder who it was that was so much more misquoted 26 years ago?)

And wouldn’t you fuckin know it, right on cue Gallo says he likes Trump in a long magazine essay where he also claims “I am not a provocateur” and in the next paragraph “I do not believe in equality.” He immediately repeats that phrase, because the essay includes a bit of Billy Brown style pushy repetition.

Sometimes I feel like the white people who were involved in the early hip hop scene don’t get enough credit, but then I read about somebody like this who has the audacity to come from that background and still give a high-five to racism. You think Trump would’ve see any difference between the Central Park Five he wanted executed even after they were proven innocent, and your old friends Basquiat or the New York City Breakers? He’s the fucking bad guy, and now you are too, Prince Vince.

In his reoccurring fights with critics, one of Gallo’s themes is that it shouldn’t get personal, the criticism has to be removed from the person. And sure, sometimes that is possible. But he knows film is profoundly personal – that little house is the one he grew up in, for christ’s sake. When the artist’s personality comes through in the movie that’s part of the movie. Of course there are plenty of great movies by assholes, but this is one where the movie itself is an asshole.

And really, would he have to say that if he was nice to everybody? Why don’t you go start a charity for artists who are misunderstood and misinterpreted just because they spend decades degrading and insulting everybody they work with or come across. The Foundation for Consequence-Free Assholery.

I guess technically BUFFALO ’66 was even smaller than MR. JEALOUSY and HENRY FOOL. It opened on 2 screens and expanded to 25 in its second week. But it got much more word-of-mouth attention and had a cult following, probly still does. Rolling Stone placed it at #98 (above CLERKS) on a list of “The 100 Greatest Movies of the Nineties.” In 2012 Mike D’Angelo still considered it “one of the most stunning debuts of all time.”

Roger Ebert would famously pan BROWN BUNNY at Cannes, become Gallo’s nemesis, then make up with him and the movie, only to be trashed by him again after death. But Ebert wrote a very positive review of BUFFALO ’66 that compared it to “improvisational jazz,” called Ricci’s performance “astonishing” and ended by saying “There’s not a thing conventional about this movie.”

It seems to have gotten very positive reviews, but that didn’t stop Gallo from being childishly combative with critics. Here he is on a weird show where the host insults three critics, then tricks them into discussing the movie without knowing that Gallo is there listening. It seems like a failed experiment when all three of them say mostly positive things, but then Gallo comes out and is still an abrasive dick, acting like he just busted them on To Catch a Predator or something.

He also brings up Ricci’s still-in-theaters movie THE OPPOSITE OF SEX, calls it “a TV movie” and claims people only say they like it because it has gay characters.

BUFFALO ’66 would later be nominated for Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards and lose to THE OPPOSITE OF SEX.

Despite Gallo’s disparagement, Acord went on to great work with Spike Jonze (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ADAPTATION, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE) and Sofia Coppola (LOST IN TRANSLATION, MARIE ANTOINETTE). Co-writer Allison Bagnall – who Gallo says converted his improvised pitch into a script because he didn’t know how to spell – became writer/director of PIGGIE (2003), THE DISH & THE SPOON (2011) and FUNNY BUNNY (2015).

Though rarely in the spotlight anymore, Gallo has continued to do his thing in his various disciplines. As a musician, he released albums in 2001 and 2002. As an artist, he sells undershirts that he wrote his name on with Sharpie. As a director he has done some shorts, plus THE BROWN BUNNY (2003) and an unreleased feature called PROMISES WRITTEN ON WATER (2010). As an actor he received acclaim for TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001), TETRO (2009) and ESSENTIAL KILLING (2010). A friend of Rick Rubin, he also appears in Jay-Z’s classic “99 Problems” video. But this cool looking movie where he has to pee and is mad at everybody might be what he’s remembered for most.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/17/buffalo-66/feed/30Dr. Dolittlehttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/16/dr-dolittle/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/16/dr-dolittle/#commentsMon, 16 Jul 2018 18:44:52 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=31968June 26, 1998 DR. DOLITTLE starts the same way DIRTY WORK did: with Norm MacDonald narrating a wacky story about the main character when he was a kid. But instead of being the main character himself and talking about a dog getting violated by another dog, MacDonald turns out to be voicing a dog named […]

DR. DOLITTLE starts the same way DIRTY WORK did: with Norm MacDonald narrating a wacky story about the main character when he was a kid. But instead of being the main character himself and talking about a dog getting violated by another dog, MacDonald turns out to be voicing a dog named Lucky who later gets violated Jeffrey Tambor. The main character is a live action human played by the voice of the dragon in MULAN, Eddie Murphy.

John Dolittle is a medical doctor with a gorgeous wife named Lisa (Kristen Wilson, who played Robin Givens in TYSON) and cute daughters Maya (Kyla Pratt, LOVE & BASKETBALL) and Charisse (Raven-Symone of later-Cosby-Show fame) and he’s kind of a self-absorbed dick who’s in such denial about having been able to talk to animals when he was a kid that he refuses to even learn what type of animal his daughter’s guinea pig is. It says right there in the title that he’s a doctor, but they still give him the standard issue Workaholic Dad Neglects His Family storyline. His office is working on a Big Merger that would make him rich, and his partner Dr. Weller (Oliver Platt, EXECUTIVE DECISION, also in BULWORTH that summer) is always hassling him because they have to impress Mr. Calloway (Peter Boyle, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, had been in SPECIES II in April) into signing The Big Contract after The Big Presentation.

But in the middle of this John almost runs over the Norm MacDonald dog and hears it call him a bonehead. Suddenly he hears animals speaking everywhere, and talks to them, and thinks he’s going crazy. Many have celebrity voices, including Chris Rock as the guinea pig Rodney, Albert Brooks as a depressed tiger, Jenna Elfman as an owl, Julie Kavner and Garry Shandling as an unhappy pigeon couple, John Leguizamo as a rat, Paul Reubens as a raccoon, Jonathan Lipnicki as a tiger cub, and Ellen Degeneres, Brian Doyle-Murray and Gilbert Gottfried as dogs. I didn’t recognize him, but Tom Towles (HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES) apparently plays a german shepherd.

While the family is vacationing in a cabin, John helps an owl with a wing injury, so word spreads throughout the forest and animals start following him around asking for help with various maladies. The middle section of the movie is a bunch of protracted, contrived scenes of him running around flustered trying to hide from everybody that he has ducks in the bath tub or that he’s doing CPR on a rat or whatever. The other humans have pretty thankless roles, especially Wilson, who spends so many scenes just acting confused and worried as he repeatedly rejects sex to go bark at a dog or drive away with no explanation.

(We hear him speaking English with the animals, but it’s indicated that people hear him making animal sounds, which must be very strange.)

There’s another straight man in Dr. Reiss (Richard Schiff, THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, also in DEEP IMPACT that summer) though Dr. Fish (Tambor, THREE O’CLOCK HIGH, who would be in THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY later that summer) gets to do some comedy, being a veterinarian insulted by this M.D.’s assumption that he knows how to diagnose animals.

Ossie Davis (BUBBA HO-TEP) may have the worst part as John’s dad who lives with the family. He stands around looking concerned until, at the very end, he admits that his son can talk to animals and that he shouldn’t have made him suppress it. It’s kinda nice but more laughable that they turn this into a plea for tolerance of people’s quirks. The doctor ends up in a mental hospital (with Don Calfa from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD) and decides to ignore his abilities so that they’ll let him out, but then he feels guilty when he sees his nerd daughter Maya follow his example and abandon her science experiments. So, fuck it, he decides to (somehow) kidnap the suicidal tiger from the circus and do surgery on it.

Hey, he’s just a non-comformist, all right? Let him be himself.

Another thing it has in common with DIRTY WORK: a joke about ROCKY III. When the tiger is feeling sorry for himself and says that people don’t like tigers, the doctor rebuts him by bringing up “Eye of the Tiger.” Strangely my mind had gone to the tiger jacket in ROCKY II. I guess tigers and the ROCKY series really are intertwined in the popular imagination.

One thing it does not have in common: very many jokes that made me laugh. I guess Rock (also in LETHAL WEAPON 4 that summer) is okay. Murphy does well with his character. But for my tastes it’s definitely not funny enough to make up for the half-assedness of the parts we’re supposed to take seriously. Unsurprisingly the writers are sitcom vets: Nat Mauldin wrote on Barney Miller, Night Court and Capitol Critters before he got into movies with THE PREACHER’S WIFE (and later A CHRISTMAS STORY 2). Larry Levin wrote for It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and Seinfeld and later did I LOVE YOU, MAN. Some of those are good shows, of course – I’m just trying to say they approach this from a joke writer’s “okay, doctor who talks to animals – what generic story template can we use for that?” type of angle.

The concept, of course, comes from a series of children’s stories by Hugh Lofting, originally conceived in the trenches of World War I as an escape from the horrors or the tedium. In the stories the doctor lived in Victorian England, had specific animal friends (Gub-Gub, Dab-Dab, the Pushmi-pullyu) not used here, and travelled around having “Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts.” The character had already been adapted into an animated short by Lotte Reiniger and a radio drama by the time of the famous 1967 movie musical starring Rex Harrison, now somewhat infamous as an allegedly undeserving best picture nominee. A new movie version directed by Stephen Gaghan (SYRIANA) and starring Robert Downey Jr. (UP THE ACADEMY) is coming next year.

Of all these, the ’98 version clearly has the least to do with the original character. They just wanted the name and a doctor who talks to animals. It’s clearly a movie that was made because of BABE‘s innovation of adding digital mouths to live action animals to make them lip sync. Like BABE it switches between that technique and realistic puppets made by the Jim Henson Creature Workshop. Kinda sad that this cheesy red-letters-on-white-background PG-13 family comedy made nearly $300 million in the same year that the beautiful BABE: PIG IN THE CITY flopped and got people fired.

I’ve noted before that Eddie “My Girl Wants to Party All the Time” Murphy always puts a bunch of R&B songs on his movies. It seems kind of funny to hear these serious songs on the end credits after the nutty professor goes around farting up the city or whatever. Dr. Dolittle: The Album has songs by Ray J, Montell Jordan, Aaliyah, Ginuwine, Jody Watley, Dawn Robinson and Tisha Campbell-Martin, etc. The one that made me laugh is the end credits one by Changing Faces and Ivan Matias, because it’s called “Do Little Things” and they just figured out a way to play with the name “Dolittle” without having to, like, sing about a veterinarian sticking his hand in a dog’s ass. According to Wikipedia, the album was “a huge success” and went double platinum. I guess the biggest song was “Are You That Somebody?” by Aaliyah, which was nominated for a Grammy.

DR. DOLITTLE had one theatrical sequel in 2001 and three DTV ones starring Pratt as the grown up Maya and MacDonald as the dog (DR. DOLITTLE 3 [2006], DR. DOLITTLE: TAIL TO THE CHIEF [2008] and DR. DOLITTLE: MILLION DOLLAR MUTTS [2009]).

For actress-turned-TV-director-turned-theatrical-feature-director Betty Thomas this was the third in a string of successes that started with THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE (1995) and PRIVATE PARTS (1997). It was her biggest hit until ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: THE SQUEAKQUEL made her the pre-WONDER WOMAN highest grossing female director of all time.

“Squeak not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But squeak the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.” –Kant

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/16/dr-dolittle/feed/17Tomb Raiderhttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/12/tomb-raider/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/12/tomb-raider/#commentsThu, 12 Jul 2018 20:09:41 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32069I think this new TOMB RAIDER is kinda good. You probly shouldn’t listen to me because I also kinda liked the new THE MUMMY, and this doesn’t have the benefit of cool monsters. It’s very much the opposite of what I liked about the previous movies based on this same video game series. I watched […]

]]>I think this new TOMB RAIDER is kinda good. You probly shouldn’t listen to me because I also kinda liked the new THE MUMMY, and this doesn’t have the benefit of cool monsters.

It’s very much the opposite of what I liked about the previous movies based on this same video game series. I watched LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER and LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE each ten years after they came out, and very much enjoyed Angeline Jolie’s shamelessly larger-than-life super heroine who parachutes into people’s Jeeps while talking to them on the phone, punches and hitches rides on sharks to escape flooded ruins, rides motorcycles on the Great Wall of China, etc. She has the talents and wits and acrobatic wire-fu skills to easily come out on top in any impossible situation, and that’s why it’s fun.

So I was skeptical when I saw that the new one was going for a “realistic” approach (partly based on a newer version of the video game). Doesn’t sound as fun to me. And Alicia Vikander, as much as I liked her in EX_MACHINA and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., looked silly to me in the trailers, leaping off crumbling cliffs, getting tossed around and scraped up and still John McClaning her way out of the rubble. She seemed too small and skinny and delicate for that to be believable. So when word on the movie was dire I gave up most of the hope that had been instilled in me by my admiration for director Roar Uthaug’s slasher movie COLD PREY and especially his viking-ish chase movie ESCAPE. (Once again, I highly recommend that movie.)

But TOMB RAIDER turned me around in a matter of minutes by introducing Vikander’s Lara Croft just right. We meet her in the ring at an MMA gym getting her ass handed to her. Yeah, she’s skinny, but seeing her cheese grater abs, tense muscles, popping veins and ROCKY temerity changed my mind. This is not a Lara Croft that can spin around on a rope gracefully firing two machine guns, but it’s one who can grapple and take a beating and take a long time to tap out of a choke hold.

She doesn’t live in a mansion, either. She gets banned from the gym for unpaid dues, despite working hard as a bike messenger. And we learn that this is sort of by her own stubborn choice – her famous rich guy father has been missing for seven years, and she refuses to give up on him, so she won’t sign the papers that would give her his vast business empire. All she has is what he taught her about puzzles and archery – the important shit.

Of course it’s a puzzle that leads her to discover his secret double life and the mission he was on to find the hidden burial place of a Japanese goddess of death. Even if she refused the call she’d still be the Tomb Raider, because she finds his files in an office hidden inside his mausoleum. But she recruits a Chinese boat captain named Lu Ren (Daniel Wu, Poison Dagger from THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS) who also has a father who also went missing around the same time as hers, and they head out on a search that strands them on a remote island where Justified‘s Walton Goggins and his army of mercenaries and prisoners are trapped until they find and open that death goddess tomb for an ominous organization called Trinity.

Unsurprisingly, Lara finds dear old dad (Dominic West, THE PUNISHER’S WAR ZONE) looking like Robinson Crusoe or Joaquin Phoenix circa I’M STILL HERE, so there’s some closure there, but he insists he can’t move on Walton or risk being forced to use his puzzle powers to open the grave and end the world with an evil curse or some shit. Needless to say it turns into an Indiana Jones style archaeological trek full of deadly traps, riddles, puzzles, skeletons and collapsing stone architecture.

Because Lara has been so well established as tough but not invincible (and especially after the scene where she chokes a guy in water, out in the field winning the fight she couldn’t back at the gym, but sobbing the whole time) it works better than you might think. Watching her walk on a ladder above a skeleton-strewn chasm gave my stomach a nudge. But they also stretch their credibility a little too far in sequences like the one where they keep tossing her crucial life-saving jewels from across the pit and she one-handed catches them every single time. And no one seems surprised. I would get it if it was Angelina-Lara, but Alicia-Lara can’t be expected to do this shit so easily. And I can’t help but think that the SPOILER non-supernatural explanation for what’s going on isn’t as fun as if she got to jiujitsu a mummy. I’m told this is a criticism that video game purists agree with, but you don’t even have to factor that in. It’s just a fact that a movie like this without monsters is inferior to a movie like this with monsters. Look it up. It’s in there, in science books and stuff.

Not a screenplay problem: the climactic escape is pretty cool but the falling debris is so obviously a special effect that I have to admit I was much more thrilled by the bicycle race sequence at the beginning, before she was even a tomb raider. That one was all stunts and editing and it had such a sense of speed and danger. I wish there was more of that feeling at the end.

Man, I really think all the stuff about setting up Lara’s pre-adventure lifestyle is the best stuff in the movie. So if this didn’t do well enough for a part 2 (which I would’ve happily seen in the theater this time) how bout a lower budget LARA CROFT: BIKE MESSENGER prequel? She has to deliver things on time and she gets chased and she’s in an underground fight circuit or whatever. Think about it Hollywood.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/12/tomb-raider/feed/27Henry Foolhttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/11/henry-fool/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/11/henry-fool/#commentsWed, 11 Jul 2018 17:14:27 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=32087June 19,1998 Here’s another last minute addition to the ’98 series in acknowledgment of the summer’s abundance of significant indie movies. I suddenly realized that HENRY FOOL being a Cannes-Film-Festival-best-screenplay-award-winning film from lauded (once lauded?) auteur Hal Hartley meant it fit right in with the other stuff I was writing about, and shouldn’t be skipped. […]

Here’s another last minute addition to the ’98 series in acknowledgment of the summer’s abundance of significant indie movies. I suddenly realized that HENRY FOOL being a Cannes-Film-Festival-best-screenplay-award-winning film from lauded (once lauded?) auteur Hal Hartley meant it fit right in with the other stuff I was writing about, and shouldn’t be skipped. All I really know about Hartley is my vague memories of liking THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH, TRUST and SIMPLE MEN when I saw them almost 30 years ago. I never saw this one until now, but I’ve read that it is his biggest box office success.

That’s surprising. HENRY FOOL is a very dry, often ponderous two hour seventeen minute sort-of-comedy that takes its sweet time getting to what it seems to be about before abruptly switching to something else for the last part. It’s raw, seems to be intentionally lacking in style or energy, at times slightly amateurish, even feeling in moments like a parody of indie movie pretension. Its two leads are an obnoxious prick with a sort of reverse charisma and a passive, inscrutable peon who barely talks, except to occasionally parrot some dumb bullshit that the other guy said that he should know better than to believe.

I kind of liked it though.

Despite the title, it’s the story of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE), a garbage man who lives with his mom (Maria Porter, whose only other credit is in HARD ROCK ZOMBIES) and his sister Fay (Parker Posey, BLADE: TRINITY) and doesn’t seem to do much except sometimes sit in an alley drinking Budweiser. Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan, TEKNOLUST) is a guy who moves into their basement apartment who always smokes and also drinks Budweiser and talks in a fake smart guy voice that’s a little bit challenging to put up with for a whole movie and makes a big fuckin show of stacking up his notebooks where he claims to be writing “my confession,” a powerful and brilliant “philosophy, a poetics, a politics if you will, a literature of protest” that’s gonna “blow a hole this wide straight through the world’s own idea of itself” that he won’t let anyone read because he’s not done yet and also I don’t think you see him working on it either but just trust him, he says it’s amazing.

Simon follows this jackass around, soaking in his self-mythologizing and taking his advice to try to express himself in a notebook. Simon writes a poem that we never hear a word of, but many characters will describe it and react to it. It makes a mute girl (Miho Nikaido, TOKYO DECADENCE) sing, turns the local teens into poetry fans, gets called pornographic and stirs up controversy with the school board, local scolds, politicians and the Pope, who lumps together “rock music, drugs, and contemporary poetry.”

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to believe his poem is any good or not. On one hand, it gets those extreme reactions. On the other hand, a bigshot publisher (Chuck Montgomery, Courage the Cowardly Dog) reads it, thinks it sucks and rejects it despite being desperate for “marginalized poets.” Later attention changes his mind about publishing it, but he doesn’t turn into a phony kiss ass – he now thinks he can sell it, but won’t pretend he thinks it’s good.

Their lives are simple. They spend much of their free time hanging out at Mr. Deng (James Saito, Shredder from the original TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES movie)’s deli, even though there’s not much room there and it kind of seems more like a 7-11 than, like, a coffee shop or something. Sometimes Simon gets threatened and harassed by Warren (Kevin Corrigan, who we’ll also be seeing in BUFFALO ’66) because Simon watched him having sex in the alley. Warren has a whole character arc where he tries to change his life by trading his leather Fonzie jacket for a tie and working on the congressional campaign of Owen Feer (Don Creech, who played Stryker in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS). He talks up his candidate in very positive terms, but then yells “Immigrant!” at Mr. Deng, so you get an idea where he’s coming from. It’s unusual to see a right winger character dream about making the world a better place and then being disillusioned when it doesn’t work out the way he wants it to.

I like the way the movie riffs on the delusions of wannabe Important Writers and discoverers of Important Writing. The people at the publishing house recognize the promotional value of Simon being a simple garbage man, and Henry talks like that makes him legit, yet Henry is embarrassed of his own past as a lowly janitor.

Though I think this is so dry and lacking in punchlines that alot of people could watch it and not notice any comedy, it’s important to note that there’s a scene where Simon projectile pukes onto a butt, and another one where we hear Henry take a loud liquidy shit for like 2 minutes, during which a misunderstanding leads to him getting married. Take that, Farrelly Brothers.

This is a title character who is swinging for the fences in the competition for most insufferable indie movie douchebag of the summer. He’s as arrogant and full of shit as anyone in THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, but straight out declares himself a genius and, unlike any of them, is guilty of (SPOILER FOR WHAT HE TURNS OUT TO HAVE BEEN IN PRISON FOR) having sex with a 13 year old girl, which he only regrets because he says it was “a pathetic little conspiracy, a transparently desperate attempt to discredit me and my ideas.” If he had to go door to door disclosing his sex offender status like Jesus Quintana he’d probly stay at each house for 45+ minutes talking up his profound genius.

Obviously he’s not supposed to be a great person. He’s supposed to be, you know… a fool. You’re invited to think he’s a liar and laugh at his pseudo-profundities like (reading a porno magazine), “I learn so much from these magazines, Mr. Deng. And I refuse to discriminate between modes of knowing.” And there’s a scene where he aggressively grabs Fay, almost Trump style, and it would be sexual assault except she’s turned on by it and goes into the bedroom. He starts to follow and then turns back and makes sexy faces at her mom. When Fay comes back out to see why he’s not there yet he’s fuckin her mom on the couch. And he acts all surprised, as if she came home early and caught him. I didn’t want you to find out like this. And then he tells Simon that he just fucked his mom and that his sister is jealous. And when Simon doesn’t want to talk about, he says “Bad move, Simon. A poet’s gotta be able to contemplate anything.”

So this guy really, really sucks. But I can’t help wondering if he’s supposed to be a little more cool than I think he is. There’s supposed to be at least a little bit of an intellectual literary bad boy aura to him, isn’t there? In the end Hartley must mean for him to have some redemption in being presented with the same situation that got him in trouble before and this time going to confront the girl’s stepdad about abusing her. (At least that’s how I interpreted what he was doing. There’s some room to read his intentions different ways.) It really feels like we’re supposed to be rooting for him to get away at the end. If so, the movie has greatly overestimated the character’s charms, in my opinion. But I’m really not sure.

HENRY FOOL is Hartley’s seventh feature, and it came out ten years after his first one, THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH. Just by watching it I don’t think I’d guess it came from a director with that much experience. He’s had eight more films since then, including two HENRY FOOL sequels: FAY GRIM (2006) and NED RIFLE (2014), which is his most recent film. He doesn’t really seem like the type, but he’s been working in TV since then (if Amazon counts as TV), directing eight episodes of a show called Red Oaks.

This was the first film for both of the leads. Ryan has gone on to be in THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and some other things. Urbaniak has done a ton of stuff, but is best known as the voice of Dr. Venture on the long-running cartoon The Venture Bros. It’s also the first film for Liam Aiken, who plays Henry and Fay’s son Ned in the last part. He went on to be the kid in STEPMOM, ROAD TO PERDITION and LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS. He was also in this obscure neo-noir I liked called THE FRONTIER. Posey was the marquee name here, not only being the ’90s Queen of Indies because of DAZED AND CONFUSED, PARTY GIRL, THE HOUSE OF YES, THE DAYTRIPPERS, etc., but she’d also recently been in WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, starting her residency as a Christopher Guest player.

When I say this is Hal Hartley’s biggest hit, I’m still talking about it made $1.338 million total. At its widest release it was only on 51 screens. These days can a movie be that small and still cause a big fuss? I’m not sure, but there were a bunch of ’em like that back then.

Summer of ’98 connections: Henry would likely fit in among the pretentious upper class New York intellectuals of THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO and MR. JEALOUSY, though his background is different. We’ll soon discuss BUFFALO ’66, where Vincent Gallo plays a guy just out of prison who in one scene has to piss really bad – here we have a guy just out of prison who in one scene has to shit really bad. Simon becomes a “Voice of His Generation” acclaimed writer like Chris Eigeman in MR. JEALOUSY. And being about a crazed act of writing also connects it to FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS.

1998 shit:The internet is talked about as a new thing people are learning about, there is a fatass laptop. Some guys at the publishing company talk about the end of print, a future where computers replace TVs as “a direct connection to all forms of media.” They’re not that far off, except maybe when they say “We’ll become more informed, more literate, increasingly productive…”

Outside of that discussion there’s not much of an attempt to be current. To me it doesn’t really look or feel like a late ’90s film. I’d guess earlier. There is no bullet time, no discussion of old movies or The X-Files, no trip hop or pop-punk-ska. There’s no music at all outside of the very simple score by Hartley himself. For an indie movie in 1998 to have this little pop culture in it is rebellious.

MULAN is the Disney animated feature of summer ’98. It’s another Broadway-style musical loosely based on an old tale, in this case the legend of Chinese warrior Hua Mulan, as described in The Ballad of Mulan. Fa Mulan – voiced by Ming-Na Wen (STREET FIGHTER), singing voice Lea Salonga (NINJA KIDS) – is a young woman in Han dynasty China in the midst of training to be a great warrior. Oh, whoops, that’s a typo – in the midst of training to be a great wife. She gets all painted up and tries to walk in confining clothes and know all the etiquette for tea drinking and what not. But she’s not up to it, even has to write notes on her hand before a test, and completely fucks it up.

Luckily there is another option. The Huns are invading and every family must provide a man or boy to fight in the army. The only male in her family is her dad Fa Zhou (Soon-Tek Oh, STEELE JUSTICE, DEATH WISH 4), a war vet who is all for going again but he’s an old man who can barely walk and she’s sure he’s gonna get fuckin killed in like two seconds so at night she steals his armor and conscription notice and runs off to pretend to be a dude and fight in the army on his behalf.

Which she’s actually worse at than being feminine. There’s lots of, you know, humor about how she says something in a normal voice and then says “er, I mean” and repeats it in a not even remotely convincing fake-masculine voice. She starts to pick up other things like to spit and do gross things to be accepted as a man. It’s like JUST ONE OF THE GUYS I guess but when they see her boobs it’s off screen.

One element that’s not in most of the other gender-switch romps: a small, shit-talking dragon named Mushu (Eddie Murphy, DOLEMITE IS MY NAME). Mulan’s grandma (June Foray [Rocky & Bullwinkle], singing voice of Marni Nixon [host of a local show I watched as a kid called Boomerang]) prays to her ancestors, who appear as ghosts and send Mushu to summon “the great stone dragon” to protect Mulan, but he accidentally breaks it so he pretends to be her guardian and tries to bullshit his way through this mess, Axel Foley style.

I don’t find Mushu as funny as I’m clearly supposed to, but he’s decent as far as these comic relief animal characters go, and probly my favorite part of the movie. Murphy made me laugh a few times, making “dishonor on you” sound like dragon for “fuck you,” for example, and the way they animate him as a sort of wobbly snake with legs makes for much more interesting physical acting than the other characters.

I like this poster better than any image in the movie

Unfortunately there’s another comic relief animal character, a cricket named Cri-Kee (come on dude, you cannot convince me that is an authentic Chinese cricket name). He doesn’t talk but he’s totally unnecessary, given to Mulan for luck and then they have to make up explanations for where she’s carrying him just so he can cause unfunny slapstick sequences like in the movie’s worst scene, where he causes Mulan to humiliate the comically fat matchmaker (Miriam Margolyes, END OF DAYS) by spilling tea on her and painting a goatee on her face.

I was not entirely surprised to learn that the both of these characters were sort of pushed on the crew by executives. Roy E. Disney convinced them to add a dragon, and the cricket is mostly Michael Eisner’s fault. Disney legend Joe Grant created the little bug, but lead animator Barry Temple admits the directors “felt Cri-Kee was a character who wasn’t necessary to tell the story, which is true.”

Anyway, there is training and eventually they fight or whatever, it’s hard to remember. I know she caused an avalanche to stop some of the Huns. The end. I wish I could pinpoint better what’s so underwhelming to me about this movie. I suppose it’s that they don’t really go full into the period military epic that the story suggests, and then the standard elements like the songs, the comedy, the father-daughter melodrama and especially the animation all seem uninspired compared to other Disney movies, including POCAHONTAS.

The directors are Tony Bancroft (animator going back to BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, but has not directed any other Disney movies) and Barry Cook (the Roger Rabbit short Trail Mix-Up, ARTHUR CHRISTMAS). Stephen Schwartz (POCAHONTAS) was hired to write the songs, and even took a research trip to China, but quit after being hassled for also accepting a job on Dreamworks’ PRINCE OF EGYPT. The three songs he’d written were abandoned. They replaced him with Matthew Wilder (a Bette Midler backup singer who produces for Hannah Montana and shit) and David Zippel (HERCULES), and I suppose their songs are memorable, because I remembered them, but personally I don’t like any of them. The big showstopper tune “I’ll Make A Man Out of You” is sung by Donnie Osmond, for christ’s sake. I guess the most influential song was “Reflection,” because the end credits version, sung by a former Mickey Mouse Club cast member, made it to #19 on Billboard’s adult contemporary charts, got the singer a contract with RCA Records and later appeared on her debut album, Christina Aguilera.

Earlier in the summer we saw how Warner Bros. Feature Animation tried (and spectacularly failed) to steal Disney’s thunder in the animated musical game. MULAN is the real deal… pretty much. It follows the same Disney formula that WB were trying to copy, at least, and the two movies ended up having a few similarities. Both have a female protagonist whose parents want her to do feminine things, but she wants to be a warrior and gets a chance to sneak off and do battle with a sword. Both are fixated on honoring their fathers. Both have a wimpy, comedian-voiced dragon comic relief sidekick. Both, obviously, prove themselves in battle and are finally accepted by their loved ones and allowed to own weapons. There’s also a falcon in this one, but it belongs to the bad guy, so it’s not the terartagonist.

MULAN is more elegantly animated and more competently structured than QUEST FOR CAMELOT, and is beloved by the generation that grew up with it. Though it wasn’t a hit on the level of Disney’s early ’90s favorites like ALADDIN and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, it was the #7 movie at the box office in 1998 and made more money than its Disney predecessors THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and HERCULES. But I have to say, it didn’t really appeal to me much then and it hasn’t grown on me.

I don’t know if this is related, but it was not created at the same Disney studio as THE LITTLE MERMAID and shit. Instead it was made at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, which opened in 1989 as a theme park attraction devised by CEO Eisner. Located on the backlot of the Disney-MGM Studios, park guests could watch these poor zoo animals behind glass as they created the Roger Rabbit shorts Tummy Trouble, Roller Coaster Rabbit and Trail Mix-Up. To promote upcoming features they’d also be seen doing little chunks of them: 10 minutes of THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER, 22 minutes of THE LION KING, 18 minutes of POCAHONTAS, etc. MULAN was the first of only three features produced entirely at the Florida studio, the others being LILO & STITCH and BROTHER BEAR.

Maybe that’s why the animation, other than a couple shots of a devastated village and a CGI crowd outside of the emperor’s palace, feels small and underwhelming compared to previous Disney movies. The subject matter calls for the grandeur of a Zhang Yimou epic, but they settle for better-than-a-TV-cartoon. I don’t care for a few of the designs, particularly Mulan’s sheep dog with dots for eyes, a character who’s more crudely cartoony than the others but not (to me) in a stylish way.

On the positive side there are some nice, restrained colors and her horse has a sharp look to it.

My favorite scene is the montage of Mulan cutting her hair (with a sword, of course) and putting on her dad’s armor to run away and join the army as a male. The angles and edits are all clearly modeled after live action filmatism, and the bombastic keyboard/drum machine scoring would sound at home in an ’80s or ’90s Hong Kong action movie. I read that this was called “Sequence Six” and had replaced a musical number. It was originally cut to the score of an unnamed live action movie and was a breakthrough in the production that led to what they considered more of a silent movie approach, using visual storytelling without the crutch of dialogue or lyrics. (But I didn’t notice any other big sequences like that.)

There are some pretty cool shots of the army practicing kicks and punches together, and Mulan does a little bit of kung fu, but the fairly simplistic character designs don’t allow for very sophisticated movements or poses.

I do appreciate that the climactic fight, though not particularly exciting, takes place partly on a rooftop, a nod to Chinese cinematic tradition.

As in QUEST FOR CAMELOT, the best designed character is the broad-shouldered villain. Shan Yu is a Hun warlord voiced by Miguel Ferrer (THE NIGHT FLIER). He’s generally draped in shadows, his pupils are yellow and his eyeballs are black instead of white. In the scenes with just him and his men the entire frame is colored with grey, black, and beige. His tank-like body probly has 5 or 6 times the mass of Mulan’s, but in one scene he nimbly hangs upside down like a monkey.

Despite all these strengths, I couldn’t say much about his personality outside of being evil. If you went around for a couple hours asking people to list every Disney villain they could think of I bet you wouldn’t find one person that said Shan Yu, and if so there’s a reason for that.

At the end all the sudden the cricket is wearing sunglasses playing drums and I thought “oh jesus” but then they try to appease me by having him be playing a new Stevie Wonder song called “True To Your Heart.” Then I realized it was Stevie with the boy band 98°, but luckily it mostly sounds like Stevie. So, you know, it’s a little bit of a reward for getting through to the end.

I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think MULAN was that good, but I cannot say I was in good company. One critic was homophobic radio kook, future universally unpopular governor of Indiana and conspirator against the United States Mike Pence, who wrote on the The Mike Pence Show websight, “I suspect that some mischievious liberal at Disney assumes that Mulan’s story will cause a quiet change in the next generation’s attitude about women in combat and they just might be right. (Just think about how often we think of Bambi every time the subject of deer hunting comes into the mainstream media debate.)”

(Because we all know how often “the subject of deer hunting comes into the mainstream media debate.”)

Pence cites the Tailhook scandal as proof that the victims of that sexual harassment should not be allowed in the military with the perpetrators. Then, in classical Pencian sexual frustration he laments “that young, nubile, 18 year old men and women were actually being HOUSED together during basic training” when “Housing, in close quarters, young men and women (in some cases married to non-military personnel) at the height of their physical and sexual potential is the height of stupidity.”

I think if twenty-years-older Pence – whose administration has launched a cruel and purposeless ban on trans soldiers – were to take time out from ducking the spotlight in hopes that people forget he was the head of the Trump transition team and should be in jail to write an updated moronic take on MULAN, he would focus on the movie’s gentle nudge at gender roles. None of the characters qualify as what we now know as trans, but Mulan has to pass as male to do what she wants in life, and her pals later take a turn dressing as women to achieve a military objective and they seem very comfortable with it. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s at least showing that it’s not embarrassing to not conform to traditional ideas of how men and women should dress. So I hope Pence is able to check out the movie again and pretend to be very upset about it before he faces justice.

As is traditional for Disney animation, MULAN received a big merchandising push, including posable action figures, McDonalds Happy Meal toys, fashion dolls with combable hair, plush animal dolls, etc. It also inspired at least three straight to video knockoffs in 1998: MU LAN (from Australia), THE LEGEND OF MULAN (from the Netherlands), and THE SECRET OF MULAN (from the makers of THE SECRET OF ANASTASIA , THE SECRET OF THE HUNCHBACK and THE SECRET OF A SCANNER DARKLY [I wish]). And I noticed another one on ebay just called MULAN (left), but I have no information about it, so it could be the same as one of the other ones I listed or it could be from a different year. It seems to have a monkey, a panda and a chicken involved somehow. In SECRET’s interpretation, Mulan is a caterpillar.

Disney’s human version of Mulan is officially designated a Disney Princess, though she is not any sort of royalty in the story. She returned in 2004 for the DTV sequel MULAN II. Much of the voice cast stayed the same, but Eddie Murphy was replaced by voice impersonator Mark Moseley, who reportedly also did some of Murphy’s lines for The P.J.s and definitely voices his total-ripoff-of-Mushu-donkey-character in the SHREK video games. Moseley is also known for the novelty song “Ronnie’s Rap” by “Ron & the D.C. Crew.”

The sequel did not go over well, but it didn’t ruin the movie’s good name. Like ALICE IN WONDERLAND, THE JUNGLE BOOK, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, DUMBO, THE LION KING and ALADDIN, the studio is about to reimagine MULAN in a live action sort-of-remake. The director is Niki Caro (WHALE RIDER) and the cast includes Jet Li, Donnie Yen and Gong Li, but from the details released it doesn’t sound like there’s a Mushu or anything else specifically taken from the animated version.

There were a couple surprising names I noticed in the credits. First of all, Conan Lee, the martial artist from NINJA IN THE DRAGON’S DEN, TIGER ON BEAT and LETHAL WEAPON 4 is listed in “additional voices.” Much weirder than that, though: Alan Ormsby was one of several writers credited for “additional story material.” Yes, the co-director of DERANGED, star of CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, and writer of PORKY’S II, POPCORN and THE SUBSTITUTE apparently helped out with a G-rated Disney movie.

Anyway, Disney’s MULAN – from the makers of PORKY’S II may be the best animated feature of summer 1998, but I don’t consider it one of the great Disney movies. Still, I think it’s a good thing that they made it. An interesting thing about Disney animation is watching them get more progressive and inclusive through years of baby steps. As I often like to remind people, when BEAUTY AND THE BEAST came out it was considered a huge breakthrough that Belle read books. They always end up offending people anyway, but I think they make a genuine effort to improve their depictions of women and to reflect genuine elements of the cultures they’re representing.

If Mulan was going to be an American kid’s sole idea of Chinese history that would be a shame, obviously. The women besides Mulan don’t end up looking so good, they only care about finding husbands. On the other hand, take a look at this clip from that Disney movie they discussed in THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, LADY AND THE TRAMP:

First thought: WOW, that scene is such a galactic leap ahead of anything in MULAN when it comes to animated performances and visual design, even though it was made 43 years earlier. Second thought: the unflatteringly exaggerated teeth, eyes and accents of those cats were pretty much the sum of East Asian portrayals in Disney animated features before MULAN came along. The “Asian characters” Disney wiki includes the ones from MULAN, both human and animal characters from THE JUNGLE BOOK, and some more recent characters, like somebody from BIG HERO 6. They have Edna Mode from THE INCREDIBLES, which I didn’t think was correct but it turns out Brad Bird says she’s German-Japanese.

But that was later, and it’s a pretty big step to go from those cats to a movie of all Chinese characters, with the majority of roles voiced by Asian-American actors. I’m not sure if it did or should bother anybody that many of the supporting players – Gedde Watanabe, Pat Morita, George Takei, James Shigeta – are of Japanese descent, or that Soon Tek-Oh is Korean-American. It’s still an impressive lineup. I have to respect the effort.

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/10/mulan/feed/47The X-Fileshttp://outlawvern.com/2018/07/09/the-x-files/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/09/the-x-files/#commentsMon, 09 Jul 2018 14:42:30 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=31937June 19, 1998 (or is it THE X FILES?) (note: Some people call it X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE, but I think “fight the future” is just the tag line, like “DIE HARDER.”) Oh shit, man. The ’90s. The X-Files sure was a bigger deal in the ’90s, wasn’t it? And in some ways this movie […]

(note: Some people call it X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE, but I think “fight the future” is just the tag line, like “DIE HARDER.”)

Oh shit, man. The ’90s. The X-Files sure was a bigger deal in the ’90s, wasn’t it? And in some ways this movie spin-off of the show is the most era-representative of the ones I’ve watched in this series so far. Not in style, or in any kind of fun, nostalgic way – it doesn’t feel very dated – but just in its view of the world. It spoke to a type of pre-millennium paranoia that has uncool associations today, but at the time was fresh and edgy and hip.

See, the internet was pretty new, so it wasn’t common to know about every strange belief or kooky fringe group. If you wanted to find out about some weird creature somebody claimed to spot you had to read outdated cryptozoology books at the library. If you wanted to know about UFO cults you had to know their address and send them a self addressed stamped envelope and read their newsletter. I don’t know why, but that’s what I did at a certain age. One time I even went to a UFO cult’s presentation on a college campus. All I really remember was a woman with a shaved head who seemed very sincere about all this. A few years later when the mass suicide happened I dug out a handout I’d saved, and though it didn’t say “Heaven’s Gate” on it anywhere it described the same theology, following the teachings of someone called “The Two” or “Ti and Do.” And I always wondered if that lady got out in time.

Maybe it was just my natural youthful rebelliousness, but at that time debates in the U.S. seemed less binary and partisan than they are now, less left vs. right, more The People vs. The Man. X-Files creator Chris Carter had come of age in the era of the Kennedy and King assassinations, and lost faith in all institutions. Suspicion about JFK and Waco wasn’t strictly for right wingers. I remember Freedom School founder Billy Jack mentioned Vince Foster conspiracy theories on one of his DVD commentaries as if they were real and universally accepted. With The X-Files, Carter tapped into those instincts to suspect the authorities are always up to and/or hiding something big, that life is weirder than they want you to know, that the world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping, carefully maintained by mysterious men in black licorice helicopters (or something, this candy metaphor may need work).

You didn’t have to believe any of these ideas to kind of admire the people who did as interesting, extreme personalities, non-conformists, mavericks, Richard Belzers. Back then they were niche groups and mostly seemed harmless. We didn’t know there would be decades of official science denial, dumb people believing dumb shit on Facebook, me worrying that 9-11 was some kind of set up to start wars that, in retrospect, I think they would’ve found some way to start anyway. We couldn’t guess that Art Bell talking about big-eyed aliens on the radio would evolve into Alex Jones telling grieving parents that their murdered children never existed, or Reddit convincing a guy to storm a pizza restaurant with a shotgun believing Hillary Clinton was selling child sex slaves in the non-existent basement. We didn’t know a real life Mulder would likely be hanging out with people whose passions include protecting Confederate monuments and preaching about the dangers of recognizing women as human beings.

It was a really cool show though. I liked it. I’m somewhere in the middle between a devoted fan and a total ignoramus. I watched it weekly for much of the run, but not all of it. I liked the mythology about the black oil and the aliens and all that, but all of my favorite episodes were the funny standalone ones like obviously “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (I’m not gonna resist a Jesse “The Body” Ventura appearance) or “Bad Blood.” Before Breaking Bad came out I thought it would be good because it was created by the guy that wrote “Bad Blood.” I never watched it though so there’s no way to know if I was right.

I liked THE X FILES MOVIE FIGHT THE FUTURE at the time, but I was curious how it would play now that I haven’t watched or put much thought into the show for many years. Unlike the STAR TREK series of movies, this was made while its show was still on the air, so it had to both make sense to newbies unfamiliar with the 116 episodes leading up to it and be satisfying as a big-screen-worthy episode for those who did. At one point they planned to end the series after the fifth season and then only do movies, instead they just moved from Vancouver to L.A. and kept going. The season 6 premiere “The Beginning” has Mulder on an FBI panel talking about what happened to him in the movie.

It works outside of that context better than I thought it would. The roles of FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny, BEETHOVEN) as UFO-believer and Scully (Gillian Anderson, JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN) as skeptical scientist are very evident – if anything, it goes too far in trying to underline it in dialogue as Mulder begs Scully not to quit the FBI because of her keeping-em-honest effect on his alien search. I didn’t remember shit about Mulder’s father, but when the conspiracy author played by Martin Landau (BLACK GUNN) talks about him it just plays like any standalone cop movie where that sort of “I knew your father” shit comes up. Same goes for The Well-Manicured Man (John Neville, BABY’S DAY OUT, DANGEROUS MINDS) and The Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis, LOOK WHO’S TALKING, THE TALL MAN). We get from their scenes that they’re some kind of upper class Illuminati motherfuckers who have bargained with alien invaders. I didn’t remember much more than that and didn’t need to.

The only thing that seemed like it would be confusing without knowledge of the show was the appearance by the Lone Gunmen – Bruce Harwood (THE FLY II), Tom Braidwood (first assistant director on one episode of Wes Craven’s Nightmare Cafe) and Dean Haglund (RoboCop: Alpha Commando) – but the worst it would cause is a feeling of “Am I supposed to know who these guys are?” for one short scene. And I guess there are a couple things that were big developments on the show – Mulder and Scully almost kissing, or actually being on a space ship fighting aliens – that don’t seem momentous if you’re just watching the one movie.

I like the earlier scenes better than the later ones. I still love that the first shot is two indistinct figures in the distance, running through snow, because I assumed it was Mulder and Scully until it said 35,000 BC on the screen (they turn out to be cave men). Then it adds “North Texas.” The story will end 35,1998 years later in Antarctica, where I assumed we were in the first place.

In the present day, Lucas Black (THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT) is some poor schmuck Texas boy who falls into a pit and gets infected by ancient alien goop. Despite the dated digital effects, the image of worm-like blobs moving under his skin and turning his eyes black are nice and gross. It’s cool that Black got to be in this little role a couple years after starring in SLING BLADE and the short-lived horror show American Gothic.

Then they continue playing with me, I keep thinking our FBI heroes are gonna make a grand entrance. Trucks keep pulling up and helicopters keep setting down and other people keep stepping onto the scene. It does turn out Mulder and Scully are in the state, but they have no idea about finding alien shit – they’re at a federal building in Dallas, just grunts helping search after a bomb threat, not taking it very seriously until Mulder’s not-by-the-book hunch to check the building across the street does find the bomb and it goes off and they get blamed and their rogue investigation into the matter turns up that it’s a cover-up and leads them to alien bodies and shit.

It’s not on the top five list of best types of popcorn entertainment, but the mix of sci-fi, FBI procedural and conspiracy thriller is at least unique. I don’t know what else to compare it to. It’s a pretty big budget ($66 million) and it’s trying to be larger in scope than the show, but it’s much more about the characters and the twisty plot than any kind of spectacle or set pieces.

There are some good sequences, though, for example when they find a giant complex out in the middle of nowhere, go inside and walk around and then all the vents on the ceiling open and it takes them a second to realize that it’s unleashing a giant cloud of bees on them. Not the bees!

And I like Mulder’s THE ARRIVAL style “holy fucking shit am I really seeing this” exploration of an enormous spaceship he finds underground. This one is not gonna give him lessons from Superman’s dad, though. Also unfortunate: I don’t really like the alien designs, vicious sharp-toothed versions of the traditional big-eyed “grey” aliens of UFO lore. I see what they’re going for but it makes for kind of a boring monster.

But the important thing is that these are good characters, and I think that comes through even out of context from the show. Scully is especially cool, a smart, professional, serious agent who is exhausted by her buddy’s obsessions but honest with him and herself when he seems to be on to something (which turns out to be most of the time). I like when they’re on a roll together, like when they go looking for the hole in the ground in Texas, find a brand new playground, see kids on new bikes, and immediately ascertain that they were given the bikes as a bribe not to talk about what went on here. It’s not all flying saucers, there’s also detective work.

Carter is an interesting figure, a guy who came seemingly out of nowhere and created this one show that had been such a phenomenon that he was given a sort of hands-off treatment rare for TV, especially back then. The guarantee of a theatrical film version was included in his contract after the initial three-season one expired

He’d been the editor of Surfing magazine before coming to TV in the ’80s, writing such TV movies as THE B.R.A.T. PATROL. An earlier attempt at a sci-fi series was called Copter Cop. I’d love to find out what that one was about. I mean, I do have one theory.

When the time came, Carter wrote the screenplay for the X-Files movie, with help on the story outline from Frank Spotnitz, one of the regular writers from the show. Spotnitz was early in his career when the show started, and he continued with related works including Millennium and The Lone Gunmen before going on to create the shows Night Stalker, Hunted, Medici: Masters of Florence, The Indian Detective, Ransom, and The Man in the High Castle. More importantly he wrote some episodes of the The Transporter TV show. I haven’t seen it, but it’s gotta be cool, right? He transports stuff. And he has different rules that he likes to cite.

For director they chose another TV vet, Rob Bowman, who’d usually do an episode or two for each show he worked on (MacGyver, 21 Jump Street, Alien Nation, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., M.A.N.T.I.S.), but he did 13 of Star Trek: The Next Generation and 33 of The X-Files. THE X-FILES was his first theatrical feature that was not about rollerblading (see AIRBORNE [1993]), and he was able to follow it with the quite good post-apocalyptic dragon movie REIGN OF FIRE and the at-least-not-as-bad-as-its-reputation ELEKTRA before saying “okay you’re right, I’m a TV guy, I’ll be over here doing 28 episodes of Castle.”

They had action figures, by the way. Made by McFarlane Toys, the influential company founded by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane in 1994, they were the extremely detailed type intended for adult object collectors more than whatever weirdo kids were into the show. Mulders and Scullys in different outfits (suit, parka) were paired with other characters or props: alien, cryopod, corpse (wrapped in a sheet, with a gurney). Also there’s “Attack Alien” with a caveman and, my favorite, “Fireman,” which is a rubber see-through post-accident fireman with the containment unit they lock him in.

You know, for kids who like to play fireman.

The movie did pretty well, about triple its budget, but I don’t think it made much of a mark on the culture, did it? We remember that yeah, there was a movie of The X-Files, and Lucas Black and bees and something. We don’t remember it as its own reference like, say, WRATH OF KHAN.

It took them ten years to get to another movie (THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE), by which point the show was off the air and the fervor had died down and that movie was not well received. Maybe you had to be there.

More ’90s shit:

Though the movie itself sticks with the feel of the TV show, the end credits have a sort of trip hoppy instrumental called “Teotihuacan” by Noel Gallagher, followed by a Foo Fighters song called “Walking After You.” They were included on X-Files: The Album which was produced by Don Was and included songs by Filter, Tonic, Ween, The Cardigans, Bjork, Noel Gallagher, etc., but the only song actually heard in the movie was X’s “Crystal Ship,” played on a jukebox. Paul’s Boutique producers The Dust Brothers also provided a cover of the theme song.

Specifically Summer of ’98 shit:

Mulder needs to piss and the bar’s restroom is closed so he goes out to an alley and pees on a wall plastered with INDEPENDENCE DAY posters. I’m sure they chose it as a dig at a very different style of UFO movie, but it’s probly also related to the box office competition with Emmerich’s GODZILLA.

Also I’d like to remind you that the way to identify nerds in CAN’T HARDLY WAIT was to give them t-shirts with X-Files related slogans and credit them as “X-Philes.”

]]>http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/09/the-x-files/feed/28Ocean’s 8http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/05/oceans-8/
http://outlawvern.com/2018/07/05/oceans-8/#commentsThu, 05 Jul 2018 18:18:53 +0000http://outlawvern.com/?p=31989Before seing INCREDIBLES 2 and JURASSIC’S 5 I wanted to catch up with OCEAN’S 8. It’s that all star ensemble heist movie that came out in theaters a month ago. I know whatever conversation there was has already died off, but I wanted to see it. Debbie Ocean, who kind of looks like Michael Jackson […]

]]>Before seing INCREDIBLES 2 and JURASSIC’S 5 I wanted to catch up with OCEAN’S 8. It’s that all star ensemble heist movie that came out in theaters a month ago. I know whatever conversation there was has already died off, but I wanted to see it.

Debbie Ocean, who kind of looks like Michael Jackson and is played by Sandra Bullock (SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL), gets out on parole with nothing but forty-some dollars, a glittery party dress and a master plan for stealing millions of dollars worth of jewelry. So she’s in good spirits. Plying her trade of theft and scams she gets herself a fancy hotel room and amenities (the fancy lady’s version of Porter building himself back up from nothing at the beginning of PAYBACK) and then goes to find her old partner Lou (Cate Blanchett, HANNA). Lou claims to have not known she was in prison, just thought she changed her number, and she says it so dryly I didn’t know at first if she was joking. I like these two.

Much like OCEAN’S ELEVEN, we get to meet the Mission: Impossible team of heisters in their regular lives as the two go around recruiting them. They rescue jewelry expert Amita (Mindy Kaling, A WRINKLE IN TIME) from working for her mom and Tammy (Sarah Paulson, THE SPIRIT) from suburban boredom. They hire hacker Nine Ball (Rihanna, BRING IT ON: ALL OR NOTHING) and three-card-monty hustler/pickpocket Constance (Awkwafina, CRAZY RICH ASIANS). Most crucially they trick movie star and soon-to-be Met Gala host Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway, HOODWINKED!) into hiring past-her-prime former fashion design legend Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter, PLANET OF THE APES) who they’ve gotten in on a scheme to get Kluger to wear a ridiculously valuable Cartier necklace that would otherwise be in a vault.

from The Hollywood Reporter

The big difference between this and OCEAN’Ses ELEVEN, TWELVE and THIRTEEN, obviously, is that Steven Soderbergh is only a producer. Director Gary Ross wrote BIG and MR. BASEBALL and DAVE and etc. and wrote and directed PLEASANTVILLE, SEABISCUIT, THE HUNGER GAMES and THE FREE STATE OF JONES. He’s had a long friendship with Soderbergh, who produced PLEASANTVILLE and even did him the favor of directing second unit for THE HUNGER GAMES, so it makes sense that he ended up doing this one. He wrote the screenplay with Olivia Milch, who directed a movie called DUDE starring Awkwafina, and is currently attached to write the BARBIE movie starring Hathaway.

It’s not a remake or reboot. There are connections to characters from the previous movies, including that Debbie is Danny Ocean’s sister. They say that Danny’s dead, but everyone seems only about 98% convinced that it’s true. My only problem with this is that SPOILER? it made me keep thinking he was gonna show up at the end, which is not the case. I think they’re just using the drama of Debbie dealing with the memory of her brother without denying the obvious possibility of them bringing the character back some day if those guys get nostalgic. I mean, they could do OCEAN’S 9 and 10 with Debbie, then unite members of both casts for OCEAN’S FOURTEEN. Or even OCEANS FOURTEEN (no apostrophe) where there’s a whole team of Danny and Debbie Ocean and their relatives.

(By the way, is it fair that the “based on characters by” goes to George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell of the original Frank Sinatra movie rather than Ted Griffin, who wrote the one with the characters these are connected to? I guess they did make up the name “Danny Ocean.”)

My biggest complaint with the movie is not a big one – it’s that maybe they do too good of a job of mimicking Soderbergh’s movies rather than establishing a separate identity. I mean, it doesn’t look as stylish as his, but it very much captures their playful, ten-steps-ahead-of-everybody-else fun, with the team having ridiculously clever workarounds for every hitch that comes up in their already ridiculously clever plan. And composer Daniel Pemberton (of THE COUNSELOR, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., MOLLY’S GAME and KING ARTHUR: THE LEGEND OF THE SWORD [honestly a great and under-recognized score]) does a good job working in the funky, eclectic vein of David Holmes.

I have this thing that I kinda forget Sandra Bullock is good until I see another one of her movies. Maybe it’s residual suspicions about her falling on her ass and being cured of racism in CRASH, or maybe it’s a snobbishness toward the type of comedies she’s been most successful with. It’s not fair because I should consider her an action icon just for SPEED and DEMOLITION MAN, and I thought she was great in GRAVITY, and I love her in THE HEAT.

I’m not into Rihanna’s music, but she has a great presence in movies (BATTLESHIP, VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS), and this is no exception. Awkwafina I guess is a rapper who I never heard of, but she’s my favorite in the movie, a sort of inscrutable weirdo who reminds me of some of the characters in STEP UP 2 and 3.

(Update: I’m listening to one of her albums now and she just bragged about watching A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN on laser disc. I’m into it.)

One odd thing about OCEAN’S 8 that I’m pretty sure no one else has picked up on is that the cast is mostly women. You don’t always get that, in my opinion. Debbie rejects one of Lou’s suggestions for the team because “he’s a he,” but otherwise gender is never discussed, and it’s not about fighting against sexism or even being underestimated. But comparing the elements of ELEVEN and 8 you can see a difference. Both have their Ocean secretly motivated by a relationship gone bad. In Danny’s case he’s getting revenge on the guy who “stole” his girlfriend, and also trying to “win” her back. In Debbie’s case the blame is placed squarely on the ex who screwed her over (Richard Armitage, THE HOBBIT trilogy), not some other woman, and he’s gonna get his not by losing money and a woman but by taking the fall.

More importantly there’s a masculine/feminine contrast to the venues of their scores. You couldn’t name many places more bro-y than Danny’s playground of Las Vegas, land of showgirls, prostitutes, “what happens in Vegas,” cigars, boxing matches and the adrenaline high of slapping your dick on the table in the form of money that you are likely to lose but take the risk because either you’re addicted to the thrill or you’re too rich for it to matter. It’s all glitz and outlandish opulence designed to lure you in and take your money. It’s gross and it’s fun.

The Met Gala is in some ways the opposite. It’s not a moneysucking enterprise run by organized crime, it’s an annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, and it’s built around creativity, as it’s mainly known as an event where celebrities compete for the most attention-getting clothing based around the theme of that year’s costume exhibit.

This is where the parallels come in: the event has become a sign of status for celebrities and rich people. This year’s guests for the real event included Jared Leto, Donald Glover, Selena Gomez, Chadwick Boseman, Jaden Smith, Madonna, and various Kardashians and Jenners. I like some of those people, but Tina Fey once said “if you had a million arms and all the people you would punch in the whole world, they’re all there.” Former WWE villain Donald Trump proposed to his third wife Melania at the Gala in 2004.

The New York Times called the yearly event “the gold standard of parties” and “the ultimate global celebrity/power cocktail” and says it’s known as “Oscars of the East Coast,” which they parenthetically explain is “mostly because of the star quotient and the elaborate red carpet, where guests pose on the grand entrance stairs to the museum.” They say that tickets this year were $30,000 each and tables about $275,000. I’m not sure if that includes processing fees, shipping & handling and all that. But not everybody buys a ticket – they also invite hot new fashion designers as guests, and clothing brands will get celebrities to sit at their tables to promote their shit.

But there’s even more elitism to it than that: “Unlike other cultural fund-raisers, like the New York City Ballet gala or the Frick Collection Young Fellows Ball, the Met gala is invitation only, and there is a waiting list. Qualifications for inclusion have to do with buzz and achievement (and beauty), a.k.a. the gospel according to Anna, more than money. Ms. Wintour has final say over every invitation and attendee, which means that even if a company buys a table, it cannot choose everyone who sits at its table: It must clear the guest with her and Vogue and pray for approval.”

Just like the Bellagio in ELEVEN, this required some cooperation with the real organization. There are brief sightings of famous people like Kim Kardashian-West, and it plays with celebrity in an odd way: Hathaway and Dakota Fanning play fictional movie stars, while Katie Holmes appears as herself. The real Rihanna has attended many times, co-chairing this year and famously wearing a pope hat, but her character seems out of place there and mostly stays in the van. All this reminds me of the scene in ELEVEN where Topher Grace, playing himself, is mobbed by adoring fans who ignore Brad Pitt, playing a character, standing next to him.

I think that each Ocean’s choice of mark acknowledges the silliness of excessive wealth. They don’t mind robbing them because it’s not gonna ruin their lives, and it’s kinda fun to make them upset, like some uptight dean in a frat comedy. But at the same time the Oceans and their numbers also clearly enjoy dressing up and taking part in that lifestyle. And, I mean, their goal is to steal millions of dollars. They’re not trying to work for a living.

OCEAN’S EIGHT is more of an OCEAN’S sequel than I expected, less of a reinvention, but as someone who enjoys those and is happy to see one with a fresh new cast, it’s a good time at the movies.